Bol.com - Techlab: Recent Episodes
bol.com - Techlab
In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com. Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms.
Neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences, such as autism, ADHD, Tourette syndrome and dyslexia, should be recognized and respected as a natural form of human diversity, similar to cultural and ethnic diversity. The neurodiversity movement advocates for the rights and equality of individuals with neurological differences and promotes the idea that these differences should be celebrated and not stigmatized.
What this episode covers
We structured this episode about neurodiversity into a couple of main topics:
- Introduction of the topic of neurodiversity and providing some background information about what it is and why it is important.
- Share personal perspectives on neurodiversity; two very personal stories from the guests of our show.
- Key Issues, Actionable Advice, conclusions and Call to action.
- The famous closing round; what are the key takeaways from our guests?
Guests
* Koen Suijkerland – Systems engineer for our TPS (Technical Platform Space).
* Krissie Prusinskaite – Software engineer in Logistics.
Notes
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/66a43f26137fbbb9c23c31cde7e15acd3dafe715-1045x255.png)In this episode, we refer to the episode about the Inclusion of introverts
In the Netherlands you can also check out Neurodivergence and Mental Health in IT on Meetup
One of our listeners pointed out to a closed channel on Slack as well. Let us know if you want to know more.
A few months ago we noticed a message that stood out on our internal platform. Basically, it stated: "I'm back". Naturally, it happens every now and then that employees explore their horizons but still return to bol.com.
What this episode covers
However, the number of software engineers that turn to indie game developer and come back, is quite limited. That sparked our curiosity since for a vast group of engineers it is some kind of dream job to develop games. That must have something to do with the large number of gamers among software engineers.
There are some interesting learnings and experiences in our conversation with Roy. Listen and check what is in it for you.
- Have you always been intrigued by creating (computer) games?
- How did you prepare for your adventure to make games for a living?
- What were the obstacles you had to overcome trying to make a living crafting a computer game?
- What did you learn?
- Please share also some examples of how you learned this?
- What will you take with you now that you are back at bol.com?
- How is it to be back at bol.com?
Guests
* Roy Kok – Software engineer at bol.com in Buying and former Indie game developer.
Notes
* Unity
Everybody can go to bol.com and check the Front-End of our webshop. But what if you are a seller, supplier, partner or internal employee? What is your view when interacting with our IT systems? In general, you will use one of our Portals. These portals made a long journey to get to the stage where they are today.
What this episode covers
Not only does the backend site, mainly covered by SWAP's (Small Web APplications) rely on different frameworks, also the Front-End work does. How to adapt to a new 'Look and Feel'? How to be consistent? How to make the lives of Software Engineers easier? Listen to this episode and find out yourself.
- What does the Portal and SWAP architecture look like in bol.com?
- What is a front-end framework?
- What role play Design Systems like Figma, Storybook, Zeroheight, Frontify, Stencil?
- What are design tokens?
- How do UX Designers, Front-End Developers and Back End Developers work together and profit from a framework?
Guests
* Jake de Oude - Front-End Software Engineer
* Robin Aldenhoven - Software Engineer within Logistics working on Front-End applications
* Robin Cijvat – Product Tech Lead
* Rens Jansen – Visual designer \ design system designer – new bol.com style in the component libraries
Notes
In an earlier episode back in 2019 we already talked about SWAPs and a blog on this topic is available here.
Welcome to episode number 100!
A special show with a very interesting topic: Inclusion of Introverts and Introversion. We asked our CEO Margaret Versteden for a quote for this number 100. She surprised us with the fact that this topic is so important for her as she is dealing with this her whole life, as an introvert.
So if you are an extrovert, we think this is a "must listen".
What this episode covers
It will help you to understand and to make the world and your environment safer for introverts. It is about the inclusion of everyone and the inclusion of introverts
Why is it so much harder for an introvert to be included than for an extrovert? To understand this, we first dive into questions like:
- What is an introvert?
- And what it is not, what are the common misunderstandings?
- Why is it so important to be more aware of these differences?
- We touch upon neurodiversity and neuro non-typical persons, as some of the requirements for a safe environment also applies for these groups.
After this understanding we dive into the environment:
- What creates a safe environment? How to include diverse people?
- What can you do as a facilitator?
- We talk about meetings, presentations, standups, dealing with feedback, spark meetings and many more examples
- We discuss tips and tricks to build a more inclusive environment
And we are confronted with our own bias, more than once.
Guests
* João Martinelli - Software Engineer and Scrummaster in one of the Payment Teams
* Sarah Gruneisen - Engineering Manager, Agile Coach and Liberator
* Reena Choudhary - Software Engineer in one of the Payment Teams
Notes
Liberating Structures: https://www.liberatingstructures.com/
Other shows on Diversity and Inclusion:
Cultural Diversity
We are not only the hosts of the show but so far we also do the selection of the topics ourselves. Research what’s interesting. Find diverse subjects and guests, etc.
What this episode covers
And sometimes guests make it easier for us. They post on our internal platform a message….
“What is the superlative of bragging? I don't think I can go any further than telling you that I co-wrote a book. And of course, it's about experimentation Yesterday I received the first copy in my hands, and it is of course for sale at bol.com ”
The book is called “Steering on results”, how to work together on the greatest ambitions. Work smarter not harder. (So far only available in Dutch but English translation is being worked on). And since this week we know that the book is on the long list of books to become Management book of the year in 2022. A Dutch award organized by one of our partners managementboek.nl. (how can I check if this is true?)
This triggered us in two ways:
First – what is the book about?
Learning by three elements
- Data
-
Tangible Objectives
- Introduction of CRAFT: Create, Refine, Align, Finalize & Transmit (CRAFT)
- Introduction of Objectives, Progress Metrics & Estimates (OPME’s), in bol.com we refer to this one as OKR's.
-
thorough research methods
Second – How is it to start writing a book?
- So we know how it started, let’s find out what it is to become an author next to your job
- When did it start?
- Why did you choose to do it?
- How did you work together?
- What steps did you take?
- Did you already have experience in writing?
- Was it according to expectations?
- What were the learnings?
- Do you advise others to write a book?
Guests
We have an award-winning guest:
Denise Visser; According to Linked in it says Product Manager Experimentation at bol.com and freelancer.
You probably know Denise from a previous show about experimentation.
Notes
Sturen op resultaat website
The Book Sturen op Resultaat
Blog on experimentation
Podcast Episode on experimentation with Denise and Maarten
Longlist management boek van het jaar
This episode is 2021 Techlab Wrapped. Inspired by one of the platforms that host our podcast Spotify.
It is the end of Season 3 and the end of 2021. Time to look back and to look ahead.
What this episode covers
2021 Wrapped and maybe a glimpse into 2022.
- We look back at 2021 by the numbers.
- Top 3 lists
- Top 5 countries
- We discuss the topics and episodes that really got us.
- For instance the one on Log4j and the PMC member who is working in bol.com.
- We share the plans of 2022 and the OKR we set ourselves: "we get on TikTok and you get to decide what dance we should perform if we double our listeners on the best episode ever"
Guests
Peter Brouwers
Peter Paul van de Beek
ShownotesTop 3 according to Blubrry
- Episode 91 - Retailer API
- Episode 93 - The Programmers Brain
- Episode 81 - Data Maturity and Data Literacy
Top 3 according to Spotify
- Team Topologies
- The Data-Driven Approach to supporting products with KPI's and OKR's
- Curiosity is the common denominator for our business analysts
The new Bol.com ECOmerce podcast about sustainability
Notes
During the recording of this episode, we are in the week of Black Friday. An exciting week for people hunting for bargains. And also for a lot of our colleagues.
What this episode covers
Whether that is from a commercial point of view or an engineering one.
All the eyeballs on our website, bring a lot of traffic. And consequential a lot of load on our systems. In this episode, we focus on one aspect of preparing for a large load: Load Testing. In this episode, we are going to talk about Load Testing with Locust. An open-source load testing tool.
Triggered by our guest's presentation during the spaces summit, we wanted to know more about this and share it with you.
- What is Locust?
- Why did we start using Locust for Load Testing?
- Examples of Load tests and Performance tests performed with this tool
- What did we need to setup for it?
- How to configure your Locust tests
- How to run your tests on Kubernetes
- What were the challenges?
- How does it make use of the cloud benefits like scalability?
Guests
* Leon van Wijk; Full Stack Software Engineer at Craftsmen and engineer in our Logistics Team
Notes
* Distributed load testing with Locust
* Locust presentation at the Spaces Summit
* Performance testing the Chat App
If you are a regular listener to the podcast or an e-commerce watcher, you know “the season” is very important for us. It is a yearly recurring theme in the podcast. You are probably also aware that uptime and responsiveness of our app and website are crucial.
What this episode covers
And you might have noticed that enabling our software engineers to perform at their peak is very important for us. Enabling teams and engineers is what we do to build a great place to engineer.
And sometimes things just go sour. A perfect storm occurs that is definitely not a tailwind…
As our CTO will say “never waste a good crisis”. We have to learn from what happened. Let’s explore one of those incidents. We go back to the season start of 2019. Just before the start of the Friday Afternoon Drinks, a huge incident started in our Android App. This triggered downtime in other areas of the platforma as well. And maybe just like when investigating a plane crash there is not just one thing that was off but a series of unlikely things happened in a short span of time. Let’s dive into this.
- Why is learning from failures an important topic to share?
- Some context, what part of the landscape are we talking about in the episode?
- What was your perspective? What were you doing and what happened?
- Taking a few steps back: What was the process of incident management and how did we step by step fix the issue?
- When the dust settled: What did we learn? What did we improve?
Guests
* Julius van Dis – Full-Stack engineer at Flock. He was responsible for the app, specifically its direct backend. Some of the projects he has done include making the app and service landscape multilingual, the migration and integration of a new gateway, creation of a basket API and improved app updates.
Notes
* Julius adventures at bol.com
* Mobile App updates
* Moving to multilingual
+ Podcast on multilingual
* Refactoring the mobile app API
* Learnings and next steps
In this episode, we virtually visit the AI for Retail Lab and dive with two members into the world of recommendations. The AI for Retail (AIR) Lab Amsterdam is a joint UvA-Ahold Delhaize industry lab and conducts research into socially responsible algorithms aimed at the retail domain. Think of developing models for recommendations and managing goods flows.
What this episode covers
The research, testing and application of the models take place in Albert Hein Delhaize and bol.com.
- What is the AIRLab (Artificial Intelligence Research Lab) and what is it trying to achieve?
- PHD projects?
- How does science profit from business involvement and the other way around?
- We take a deep dive into recommendations
- What is being researched?
- Why is this important?
- What is the hypothesis?
- What has been discovered so far?
- Explore the approach to the research.
- How can both business and academia benefit from this research?
Guests
* Barrie Kersbergen – Recommendations bol.com & PhD Candidate at AI for Retail LAB
* Sebastian Schelter - Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam
Notes
* AIRLab research papers
* Earlier episode on the gathering of measuring data. The feedback loop for recommendations
Warehouse mechanization is a part of our IT landscape where our IT meets the physical world. It is one of those places where we encounter that while we could scale our IT almost indefinitely in the cloud, the physical world and warehouses don't work that way. As you listen to this episode you will learn how the world of IT has to adapt to the physical world to make things work.
And as Peter states this is also the place where e-commerce comes to life.
What this episode covers
This is the place where all the bits and bytes in the webshop have to lead to tangible products that are picked and delivered to our customers. By all measures a real interesting place.
:* What sets warehouse mechanization apart from other software engineering? * To enable our growth we need more and more warehouses. What do we need to get a warehouse live from a WMS and/or warehouse mechanization perspective? * To what extent do you need access to the physical parts? * Do we use simulation?
Guests
* Frank Lakerveld – WMS consultant in Logistics
* Dennis van Duijn - Systems Engineer in Logistics
Notes
* Simulation and Data Science for our warehouses
* Performance boost the picking algorithm
* The life of a WMS consultant
Some aspects of software engineering are easily overlooked. In the book The Programmer's Brain some of these like reading code, thinking about code and collaborating on code are at the centre. In this episode, we talk to the author of this book to guide us through these aspects.
To improve your coding skills it is good to know how your brain works.
What this episode covers
That will enable you to set your brain to work for you. If you spent significantly more time on reading code than on writing code, shouldn't we focus more on learning to read code? These are the topics we explore in this episode.
If you’ve ever wondered what working smarter instead of harder is supposed to look like, you should read this book. I am already seeing improvements in my day-to-day work.
What the programmer's brain covers* What every programmer needs to know on how the brain works. * What you should know about cognition. * A lot of exercises for programmers. * How do I improve myself on coding? * What is the difference between an expert and an intermediate programmer? * And Felienne shares ideas and working formats to improve collaboration on programming.
Guests
* Felienne Hermans - Associate Professor at LIACS - Universiteit Leiden. Keynote speaker, podcast host and book author.
Notes
* The book on bol.com: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/the-programmer-s-brain/9300000033887759
* Code Reading Clubs: https://code-reading.org/
* More on Engineering Productivity.
Imagine you want to buy something. You go to bol.com and you start typing the article in the search bar. Automatically you will be served suggestions and as a result, you want a limited number of articles from our 30 million products catalogue.
What this episode covers
You select the product you want, press the buy button and there it is, at your doorstep at the selected moment.
Sounds simple, right?
Inspired by a talk of our guest of this episode earlier this year, we wanted to find out what's behind the search bar. We wanted to understand search queries. Simple at first glance, but when we dive into it we found out it's way more complex than you might think.
We had great learning: as a customer, I help other customers to improve their search results. How that works? Listen to this episode.
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/bd51783981f1b35051359902ea03bea2213d1a9f-680x361.jpg)The search bar on the bol.com website
What it takes to searchQuestions will be answered like:
- How do I search for a product?
- We are not talking about the Google Search Engine and SEO and why we do not use Google Search?
- How important is search?
- What happens when you type in a search query?
- Terms you need to understand when we talk about search: relevancy, ranking/sorting, first page, tail page.
- What items do you need to take into account: Spelling, Target Category, Filter values, Broadness.
- How do we take trending topics into account?
- As an International Engineer, is it hard to work on a search engine with Dutch Product Content?
Guests
* Nikolai Bogdanov – Software Engineer in the Buying domain – Help me find.
Notes
* Spaces summit Talk on Youtube
* The search result of the red water kettle as given in the example
* Search via Voice is different, check this episode for more detail
In early April the latest version of our Retailer API was launched. Given the importance of the API for almost 15.000 partners this was again a major step. Over the years the retailer API became the heart and soul of our ecosystem.
What this episode covers
But this path wasn't always that obvious. It took vision, decisiveness and perseverance to get this far. In this episode, we explore this journey.
The importance of the Retailer APIAPI’s are considered a major part of a serious platform. They enable growth and stability. The 80/20 rule applies when it comes to the usage of the partners of their interaction with bol.com. 80 per cent of the sellers use the seller dashboard, 20 per cent the Retailer API. But when it comes to the number of orders, it’s the other way around. 80 per cent via the API and 20 per cent via the dashboard. And if you imagine that over 50% of the goods being bought at bol.com are goods from our partners, it shows the importance of this API.
What we discussed about the Retailer API (Application Programming Interface)* What is an API in simple terms? * Why is API used? * How did we start the API? * What functionality is in the API? * What is API and types of API? * What is API to API integration? * What is API example? * How does the API interact in the Landscape? * How do we balance "adding new functionality" vs. "maintenance" * Why became the Retailer API the heart and soul of the ecosystem?
Guests
* Maarten Roosendaal – Business Architect / Product Owner for our Retailer API;
* Jarno Walgemoed - Owner at Sourcelabs; Software engineer with a strong focus on partner API’s at bol.com and host of the sourcelabs podcast
Notes
* In an earlier episode, we talked about API development for bol.com and we also touched upon the Open API. The API is used for customer interactions. https://techlab.bol.com/api-development-for-the-retail-platform/
* API Developers can find more information here: https://developers.bol.com/
Engineering Productivity
With the growth of our engineering community, the need for more focus on engineering productivity is clear. We invited two experts to discuss this topic with us. We actually got to this point when one of our listeners pointed out one of the products we are using for this and how awesome a topic that would be for our podcast.
Backstage
The product he was referring to, is Backstage.
What this episode covers
Backstage is a platform for developer portals that is used as an app store for tools for software engineers. This product was build inside Spotify and later on open-sourced by them.
We thought it was a good idea to get these tools in a unified package
Questions we touch upon* What does engineering productivity mean? * How is engineering productivity measured? * Why is engineering productivity important? * How can engineering productivity be improved? * What is Backstage open source? * Who uses backstage io? * Why Backstage io? * What is Spotify backstage?
Guests
* Roy Jacobs – Software Engineer – Technical Platform. Already joined us when we explored Axle – the opinionated support for our scrum teams using Java
* Onno Ceelen – Product Manager – Technical Platform
Notes
* Backstage homepage
* Introduction to Backstage at Spotify
* Axle the bol.com Springboot framework: podcast, blog on Axle usage
How interaction resulted in a guest appearance
“We like interactions and feedback”, that’s what we say in our outro. The guest of our show reacted to one of our podcasts earlier this year. We reached out to him and invited him to the podcast.
What this episode covers
Why? Because it’s good to look in the mirror. Check our stories with the outside in view. And that’s exactly what we are going to do in this show. Getting the outside perspective on the edges of autonomy.
Discussed Items on the edges of autonomy* Why do you interact and why is interaction helpful? * How can we complete our stories? * What items do you miss when you listen to the stories in a holistic way? * What is an example of autonomy? * What is team autonomy? * What is autonomy and why is it important? * Does autonomy mean control? * What are the three types of autonomy? * Is autonomy good or bad?
Guests
* Thomas Heijtink - Full Stack Software Engineer & Product Owner at Fleetgo, but above all loyal supporter of the show and searching the interaction.
Notes
* Agile at scale
* Man on the moon
How Data Science supports us to predict the unpredictable
Just like for any store, forecasting is an important tool to support the business and its profitability. At bol.com we have worked on several major iterations of our forecast. One of the hosts worked on a large leap in forecast performance over 8 years ago. You can check some another leap we have made while listening to our podcast episode from May 2019 - nom more crystal ball for forecasting, Data Science it is.
In this episode, we explore how we have improved on that one.
What this episode covers
One of the leaps we made Is in the operational part of running a Data Science-based forecast in production. This is intriguing because this mechanism at the same time speeds up our innovation speeds because it enables us to do more experiments and train our models more often.
One important input we added to our forecast during the pandemic was the "Covid Severity Index". This improved our forecast performance and enabled us to work with scenarios. The latter also supports all the other retailers that sell on our platform.
Discussed Items on forecasting with Data Science in Covid-19 Times* Forecasting in general * Specific forecasts for specific needs * Aggregation * Coherence * Who is responsible for what? * What can we predict with Data Science? * How do you forecast sales Data Science? * Tech used * Input data * Experiment by using branches to innovate faster * Airflow * Dr. Watson as a gatekeeping tool to validate the output * Corona impact on forecasting * Covid Severity
Guests
* Catia Silva – Data Scientist in forecasting. Presenting at conferences
* Eryk Lewinson – Data Scientist in Forecasting
Notes
Why build an open-source FTP server in Rust?
Sometimes, I must admit I’m a little dazzled by all the languages, frameworks and stuff our engineers work with. So, when our guest of today explained to me some of the intriguing aspects of the language we will be discussing in this episode I had to stretch my mind a little. I managed and could follow his explanation.
What this episode covers
And I found a great topic for this podcast.
In the episode, we explore the Rust programming language and our first open-source code in this language: unFTP. When you need to FTP but you don't want to. We will show you the advantages of using this FTP server in the Cloud for the cases that still require you to FTP.
What we discussed* The programming language Rust + What is Rust and why is it so popular? + What programs are written in Rust? + Why should software engineers learn Rust? * The project unFTP + Why unFTP? + Where does the need for a cloud FTP server stem from? * unFTP as Open Source project + We open sourced unFTP. What are we trying to achieve by doing this? + What are the results so far? + Did it help that unFTP featured on This week in Rust?
Guests
* Hannes de Jager – Software engineer for the retailer bol.com
* Rob Klein Gunnewiek - we called him System Engineer Extraordinaire last time he was on the show. Besides that, he is one of our Site Reliability guru's.
Notes
* Turning rusty tech into Rust ~ When you need to FTP but don’t want to
* unFTP Github'
* libunftp on crates.io
* This week in Rust on unFTP
* The Terraform wrapper that was mentioned
Who is the Podcast
.
Guests
?
This will be a bonus episode. Maybe not that tech-related but instead you will listen to a very energetic, passionate and inspiring person: The Podcast
Notes
What is the key competence of our business analysts (BA)
We talked about domain knowledge, tech affinity and building bridges between stakeholders and software engineers. Sometimes the business analyst is almost seen as a project manager. Aligning with product owners is key in this role.
What this episode covers
Every business analysts within bol.com fills in this role differently but about one thing they are very clear; for our business analysts curiosity is key.
Time to dive into this BA role. We see this role as a key to success in our multidisciplinary product teams. They form a bridge between the stakeholders with their business requirements and the software engineers providing the tech solutions.
Guests
* Adinda Biesbroeck – BA Retailer portal – 5 years at bol.com.
* Naomi Platenburg – BA Capacity Management Warehousing – Daily steering – started in March after an internship.
* Mitch de Vries – BA Team 15 C – Contract en Condition management in Retailer1 - 3 years at bol.com.
Notes
Next level leveraging cloud computing
We moved 70% of our services to the cloud and new services start in the cloud unless... Time to dive into a topic brought up by our tech leads. Want to know how you can maximize your cloud benefits?
Alexandra wrote a blog post on Horizontal Pod Auto-scaling, HPA.
What this episode covers
It triggered us for this episode.
Maximizing cloud benefits can be done in many different ways. For this episode, we dive into auto-scaling. Cloud computing brings great features for scaling up and down based on the needs of an application. But if you think my application can scale on-premise, just copy that principle in the cloud. Think again. You might be overspending or still underperforming. Our guests explain why this is and what to do to maximize your cloud benefits.
Topics discussed* Introduction * What our cloud strategy is (GCP, run in Kubenetes, Istio, cloud-native, etc) * Migration strategies for feature teams (check) + Lift and shift + Move and improve + Rip and replace * Explain horizontal vs vertical scaling (based on the lawnmower metaphor) * A concrete example of using k8s HPA: MESS application + Prerequisites before setting up HPA + Before and after setup: - The only way to make this faster is by adding bigger hardware and remain the number of instances. - And IF you can add more instances easily, then there is the problem that the new instance contains everything, so you’re not only scaling the parts where it hurts the most. * Cost optimization
Guests
* Rogier Lommers – Space Tech Lead at bol.com
* Alexandra Egher - Product Tech Lead at bol.com
and both friends of the show!
Notes
* The podcast about Axle, our own framework for developers based on Spring Boot can be found here
* R2D2, our own cloud integration tool is explained in this episode
* Link to Techlab blog post of Alexandra
SidenoteIn general, a story about architecture that relates to all of this.
Writing an article is reflection, publishing it is getting feedback
Learning from our colleagues. That is important to us. So, we were delighted when we found another great piece of this on LinkedIn, Elinore shared.
to inspire others who are thinking of transitioning from tech into a leadership role or are just curious about my experiences and thoughts.
The transition from tech into a leadership role is actually a very hot topic and not only within bol.com.
What this episode covers
We learn this from the job interviews when candidates ask us about career paths in bol.com. Also when we introduced the role of the tech lead in bol.com last year. And when we formalized the job profile for Engineering Manager. We used to call this Team Lead IT and with this formalization, we also had discussions about the background of the Engineering Manager should or shouldn’t be a former engineer?
In the article Elinor addresses 5 aspects she learned:
- Management Is actually a job.
- You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
- A leader doesn’t have to be a manager.
- What got you here won’t get you there.
- Your next step is not the rest of your life.
We will go over these items in this episode and along the way we touch on other great insights, will there be a next article? One of the insights we want to share with you here is that a lot of people in tech are leaders.
Guests
* Elinor Bakker – Lead Architect, Creative problem solver and silo buster. Friend of the show, Small Web Apps
Notes
From how it was born to what it is now in 45 minutes
One of the things that make us really proud about working in Tech at bol.com is our annual Space Summit. Our internal tech conference by developers for developers. And maybe you can recall we had quite some interesting episodes, blogs and videos about it and some of the talks given there in the last 2 years.
This year is a special edition! We celebrate our 5th anniversary!!
In June 2018 Peter published an article on Linkedin with the subject: “What happened to me today? After the Spaces Summit of that year, he had to write down that experience.
What this episode covers
Why? Because he was really proud of what the engineering community within bol.com was capable of. And now, three years later we celebrate the 5th one.
Topics in this episode* The journey of the spaces summit + The early years. + Growing + Moving to an online event + Anniversary edition - hybrid + The future * The organization of the Spaces Summit + Preparation + Communication + Speaker selection and preparation + Speaker support + Coordination + Fun stuff and Enjoying + Mediocre stuff + Playground * Raising the bar is what we do in our jobs but also for this summit. + How do you top each year the previous year?
Guests
* Luc Kleeven – Software Engineer (Platform) – Venue and budget
* Aysegul Guldes – Software Engineer (Reverse) – Venue and budget + Speakers and program
* Jasper Adegeest – Data Scientist (SAFe space) - Speakers and program
* Tim van Hardeveld – Coordinator Onboarding, Learning & Development- Venue & Budget + Playground +
Notes
Data Maturity Model as common ground, Data Literacy Model to measure the level of speaking, writing and reading data
To state as a company we want to become more data-driven is the first step. To truly understand what this means and define a common ground to discuss the progress is the second.
Back in the eighties, the Capability Maturity Model was defined to develop and refine software development processes. Later on, many more Maturity Models were introduced like the Business Maturity Model, the Lean Maturity Model and Agile Maturity Model.
What this episode covers
To develop and refine the data-driven organization, we created the Data Maturity Model. This model enables us to measure where we stand in our goals towards 2023:
- Our data consumers are self-sufficient: They know what they need, what they look at, how to analyze this and how to use insights/focus on in their daily jobs.
- We want to do this in a scalable way and empower the users.
- To know what the current level of maturity is in the organization we apply different models and this helps us to fill in the white spots (e.g. in training).
- And we can apply the same for partners (future).
Bol.com Data Maturity Model
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/b5fe8f6cd4bdcc72dda891985ce7b2eea9cdd40f-680x382.jpg)Data Literacy ModelOne specific element of the Data Maturity Model is about skills. On what level are you able to read, write and speak data. This is captured in the Data Literacy Model. We discuss the bol.com interpretation of the Data Literacy Model.
Bol.com Data Literacy Model
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/6a8ecfb1da2940d4b945dd2da57e989d67dce4dc-680x286.jpg)
Guests
Willem Bekkers – BI specialist and Data Coach – involved in eg our measurability month.
* Meike Teunissen – BI specialist who is in the Autonomous Insights team and the* expert within bol.com in Tableau.
Notes
* This podcast episode can be seen in a combination of podcast episodes covering the data-driven organization:
+ Data-Driven Approach to supporting products with KPI's and OKR's
+ Innovation Rhythm - How to drink less coffee and achieve more
+ Cloud as Enabler to become more data-driven
+ Agile at Scale – Reality is complex, don’t expect simple solutions
- OKR Guide
Supporting products with KPI's and OKR's
We had previous episodes on how bol.com is moving to a product organization. In this one, we’ll dive into how to measure the success of these products and set objectives for them. Including measuring whether we are getting the desired results.
What this episode covers
Being the data-driven company that we want to be we asked our data people to help us to get the right KPI’s for all our product and support the products in defining proper OKR's.
Data availability should never be an excuse to not start KPI's or OKR's - Frans Poldervaart
We came with a team to support products with KPI's and OKR's. One of the recurring themes is the difference between KPI's and Key Results and what their relation is to metrics. If you want to know more about that topic, check this video.
What will we explore?* Some context first. What are domains, products, OKR's and KPI's. * What is a product KPI and a product OKR? * What is the difference between OKRs and KPIs? * What is the Product KPI and OKR program about? * How do you set OKR's? * How do we support our teams with this? * 6 elements of a data driven team. * Data culture. * What does this support look like? * Data maturity model. * What did we achieve? * Data coaching toolbox.
Guests
* Willem Bekkers – BI specialist and Data Coach – involved in eg our measurability month.
* Frans Poldervaart – BI specialist and Data Coach, who thinks he is over-exposed and a big fan of the Hoi Anh food truck. Loves sharing all kinds of data thingies on bol.com.
Notes
* There will be an upcoming episode on data literacy framework.
* OKR Guide
* KPI = Key Performance Indicators
* OKR = Objective and Key Results
Every time I look at you. I see myself.I'm so proud of you.For you help make me what I am.A better man.I'm just so proud of you.~ Lyrics by Alain Clark
A special episode comes with a special opening. In February we had an extraordinary occasion during our onboarding.
What this episode covers
Father and Son in the same 'virtual room. Father started as Software Engineer in the bol.com security department and son started as... Software Engineer in the security department, doing his final intern assignment.
We have got many examples of father and son working relationships, One of the most famous at the moment are Max and Jos Verstappen. And we know more in the F1 (Hamilton in the past, Stroll). And of course, we know about company’s set up by one and succeeded by the other. So, really interesting to find out how that works in IT.
This story gave us a lot of hooks to discuss different aspects of our Engineering Culture and Way of Working. Besides the fact that we had a very proud father in the show, he also explained how he is impressed by the speed of this young generation. It will give insights into the internship position and the role of the intern. Is an intern an employee? What type of employee? At least we discuss what it means to onboard for an intern assignment and the steep learning curve to overcome in our environment.
He will always be my child, but he is not a kid anymore - Chris Polderman
It will trigger you to think about your own relationship with your kid and/or father/parents. Do you know what your fathers work look like? Your kid is ready to enter the working life, did you perform well as a parent? Is your father the same person at home as he is at his work? What can I learn from my own kid?
Guests
* Chris Polderman – Software Engineer in security.
* Martijn Polderman – Intern in security
Notes
Father and Friend - Alain Clark
The why and what of our Software engineers on Duty
Let's be honest about this, nobody likes to be woken up at night to react to an alert whether it's a text- or whatsapp message, (automated) phone call or traditional pager. But every company taking his 24/7 run seriously has to organize their on call duty in a scalable and sustainable way. Initially bol.com organized it in a traditional way, meaning a team of system engineers with different specialism took care of the duty.
What this episode covers
Only a couple of years ago we realized we needed Software Engineers in this setup as well. In this episode we ask our guests everything about this journey so you can learn from this.
We explore aspects and explain why you sleep well at night* Why did we start the Software Engineer on Duty (SoD) initiative? * What does the current SoD look like? * What is the relation between SRE and SoD at bol,com? * What are the prerequisites for a team to hand over responsibilities to SoD? * Experiences working as an Engineer on Duty.
Guests
* Ruud Straver - Site Reliability Engineering Manager
* Bart Enkelaar - Regular on the podcast, host of the Friendly Tech Chats
Notes
Don't miss our story of the introduction of the Tech Leads
During the podcast, you will find out what Tech Leads are and why we need to build this community of Tech Leads at bol.com. You will learn how we approached this and avoid hiding the Tech Leads in ivory towers. The two tech leads and an IT director share best practices and pitfalls (and what we learned from them).
The Why and What of our Tech Lead Community
Tech Lead Community
Why did we start to define the role?
What is the Tech Lead for bol.com,
Responsibilities
Product Tech Lead
Space Tech Lead
It's a fun challenge and it's taking time" - Eduardo da Silva
The backlog of the tech leads
Backlog of community
Tech Radar
Tech Vision
Backlog Space Tech Leads
Cloud Migration
Backlog of products
Examples
Introduction of the role (process)
Definition
Scale, number of Tech Leads needed
Rollout / Hiring part
Building the Tech Lead Community
Lessons Learned so far
Best Practices
Pitfalls / Challenges.
Guests
* Alexandra Egher; Product Tech Lead at bol.com
* Mirko van Ede; Director IT - Shopping & Marketing Technology at bol.com
* Eduardo da Silva; Tech Leader & Sociotechnical Architect at bol.com
Notes
The book Talking with Tech Leads by Patrick Kua.
We talked about API design and development in a previous episode.
Introduction
Peter is very honest in this episode (the stage is not the place he is really comfortable at) and Peter Paul is sharing his first experience with Improv (is it a small trauma Peter Paul?).
So time to talk about Improv, Improvisation Theatre and applied Improv because we do want to learn about it and we are really curious how this relates to our Tech Community.
Our guest Burgert prepared this along with these main topics Mindset, Skills, Culture, Structures and Who benefits.
Mindset - Relates to the Improv Manifesto
Making your partner look good over making yourself look good.
Saying yes and over saying yes but.
Playing in the moment overthinking and talking about the past of the future.
Everything is an offer.
There are no mistakes.
Be average.
Make a strong choice and stick to it.
Skills
Listening.
Making choices.
Speaking with confidence.
Connecting/collaborating with others.
Mental agility.
Staying calm in uncertainty.
Role flexibility.
Culture
Safe to make "mistakes" - happy accidents.
The positive atmosphere of acceptance.
Open to what emerges. Respect and value for others.
Courage.
Commitment.
Focus.
Structures
Games, formats.
Who does benefit
I - The Individual
We - The Team
Everybody - The Organization.
Guests
* Rob de Groot; systems- and metrics engineer in the Technical Platform.
* Burgert Kirsten; Way of working coach in Platform - Innovation Support. He previously appeared in the Techlab post on human systems engineering.
Notes
Introduction
In July 2019 we had our first podcast episode on voice and Google Assistant. Back then Marieke and Marvin introduced us to the future of interaction by voice. In this episode, we dive into the potential of brand recognition.
Many people in The Netherlands will recognize the voice we use in our commercials on radio, television and social media as the voice of bol.com.
What this episode covers
The value of this brand recognition is the starting point of the journey to get this voice into the Google Assistant. By doing so we differentiate from our competitors who are using the 'regular' Google Assistant voice.
Join us to see how we can increase brand recognition with Google Assistant.
Guests
* Kristiaan Hoogendoorn; system engineer in the Site Reliability Team and Young Professional
* Dave van Kasteren; software engineer in the Logistics domain and Young Professional
Notes
In an earlier episode, we explained how we started our voice journey and enabled Voice control with bol.com (Ok Google)
Google Dialogueflow
Introduction
Another week another book discussion. Maybe we can start a second Techlab Podcast dedicated to interesting books? We got some great responses on the last week’s episode about team topologies and we had a good opportunity. So it is time for the Never Split the Difference - Podcast.
In earlier episodes, we talked with YP’s about their side projects (behind the mask - platform for the hospital to share experiences and Real-time sales dashboard), about the YP program itself and participating in competitions, the BAPC2020.
This time we sit together with representatives of the YP program because they started something really cool.
What this episode covers
The YP Bookclub. And why do I think it so cool? Because they came up with a title I wouldn’t think of Never split the difference Authors: Chris Voss Tahl Raz. Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage international kidnapping negotiator and in this book he takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives.
So, how is this relevant to our YP’s in bol.com?
- First, we discuss the idea behind the YP Bookclub and the format.
- After that, we dive into the book and what the learnings are.
- We connect these learning to the daily job of engineers in general and Young Professionals in particular. And think about how Never split the Difference - podcast could be interesting for you.
Guests
* Priyanka Radja; Software Engineer • IT - Selling Assortment Fintech – Offer Highway
* Chris Langhout; Software Engineer • IT - Selling Assortment Fintech – Offer Highway
Notes
Akerman model – 65% of the price, 85%, 95%. Increments from big to smaller.
Black Swan Theory
Book: Socrates op Sneakers
Introduction
A lot of people involved in the design and structuring of organizations could learn a lot from the book Team Topologies. Our guest describes it in the episode a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for organizational design and evolution. The header of the website and the subtitle of the suggest that it is the way for organizing business and technology teams for fast flow.
In the episode, we discuss the 4 kind of teams and the 3 ways of interactions between these teams that are at the core of Team Topologies.
What this episode covers
Besides that, we cover the fundamental topics like Conway's Law, Cognitive Load and share examples of the use at bol.com.
Guests
* Eduardo da Silva - Space Tech Lead and sociotechnical architect
Notes
Blog post by Eduardo on Team Topologies
The book Team Topologies
Our previous podcast on sociotechnical architecture
Introduction
It sparked in the episode Interactive heavy applications we should record a podcast episode on TypeScript. Around the same time, we came in contact with Hackages. A company focusing on learning tech.
What this episode covers
Time to bring the engineers together and dive deeper into TypeScript.
Typescript is mentioned amongst the 5 most promising languages in 2020.
We talk about:
- What is typescript and how do you benefit?
- What are good implementation strategies?
- Bol.com examples
- Examples from Hackages
- Maturity in the usage of Typescript
Guests
* Niels van Midden; Front End software engineer at bol.com
* Davy Engone; Software Engineer at Hackages (the– The guy that is going to make you use/adapt TypeScript
* Kasper Peulen; Fullstack engineer at bol.com with focus on Front End
Notes
Refactoring your code blogpost, one of the areas typescript is being used in bol.com
Typescript home
Introduction
We want to share our approach to IT to learn and entertain you. In this episode, we are happy to have an external guest at the table discussing with our internal guest.
GraphQL stands for Graph Query Language and is used for interacting with services from the frontend. We are talking about API's here.
What this episode covers
Explore with us the possibilities this approach has to offer and how it could even help you to speeds up innovation in the front-end.
Like our guest mentions:
GraphQL is a specification not an implementation
TopicsWe discussed the following topics
- What is GraphQL?
- What problems does it solve?
- When should you avoid it?
- Do you need additional security measures?
- How is it used at bol.com?
- What is (a)typical for the use of this Query Language at bol.com?
- What does a development team need to get started?
- How do you document what you can query?
- What is the future?
Guests
* Albert Groothedde - Software engineer Frontmen / Rabobank used GraphQL both on front-end and back-end side at several clients
* Eduardo Gomez - Software engineer used GraphQL on the back-end side.
Notes
Falcor JS - Netflix
GraphQL vs. Falcor (Netflix)
Apollo GraphQL Data Graph Platform
Introduction
No rhythm like algorithms. We have been talking in the podcast about programming contest before. For example, about our own Spaces Championship and Advent of code, which also takes place at the end of the year.
What this episode covers
Today we’ll be talking to some participants in the BAPC - The Benelux Algorithm Programming Contest.
Like stated on the website of BAPC, it is a contest in which about 90 teams from leading universities in Luxemburg, Belgium and The Netherlands participate. The teams have to solve a series of algorithmic problems and puzzles. The BAPC 2020 was held on December 12th at the Delft University of Technology and is organized by Mathematics Informatics Study Association ‘Christiaan Huygens’
Topics discussed:
- What is BAPC2020?
- Serious business
- Strict rules
- Two bol.com teams competing, why?
- How is it organized? Virtual, gathering?
- What kind of problems to solve?
- Should you be an experienced SE?
- Our own bol.com spaces championship
- And the main question: will the hosts of the show compete in an upcoming championship?
Guests
* Nena O'Driscoll; Young Professional, joined several bol.com and participated in one uni programming competition before, but never the BAPC
* Bas van Rooij; Young Professional, joined several bol.com programming competition before, but never the BAPC
Notes
Scoreboard of BAPC 2020
BAPC2020 on youtube, get an idea on the live scoreboard
Blog: The Dutch Software Testing Championship
Introduction
It happens a lot that listening to a podcast sparks new questions. So, after our episode on Front-End quality, we wanted to know more about Storybook. This coincided with some people reaching out to us to collaborate in the podcast.
What this episode covers
And look where we are now: creating a new podcast on this subject. We asked our selves the question: Could it be the holy grail for front end development?
Topics discussed:
- What is Storybook?
- What problems does it solve?
- How does it support app development?
- What does the Add-on ecosystem look like?
- Is there a way to do accessibility testing?
- How do we at bol.com use this tool?
- What future developments can we expect?
Guests
* Yann Braga (twitter)- Senior Front-End Engineer at FrontMen; Contributor to Storybook.
* Niels van Midden - Front-End engineer at Bol.com in the checkout team.
Notes
The Storybook page.
The presentation at Codemotion by Yann.
Yann is building a Storybook course together with newline.co; Keep an eye on their website for the release.
Introduction
Weaving a Service Mesh for Multiple Clusters at bol.com - that was the title for the presentation our guests gave during the virtual KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2020 earlier this year. This triggered our curiosity. We have questions like what is this service mesh about? Why do we need it? How did we implement it?.
Guests
* Remco Overdijk; Tech Lead Provisioning Fleet / Expert System Engineer at bol.com. You might know him from the episode where we spoke about Kubernetes.
* James Brook; Cloud Solutions Architect at Google
Notes
CNCF
Istio
Remco and James presenting at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2020
Introduction
One of the purposes of this podcast is to share our unique bol.com culture with you. Traditions play an important part in culture. So, in this episode, we share a view on the evolution of a tradition.
What this episode covers
A tradition that underlines our focus on data. In this sales season, everybody in bol.com wants to know how we are doing, preferably Real-Time. With the latest version of the Real-Time Sales dashboard, our guests managed to get the information within 100ms from sales to the dashboard.
If you are one of the people that spent maybe a little too much time watching the results of the election in the US of A unfold on CNN or another network, you could catch the bug of this tradition too. We have a magic board, but we don’t have the talking heads that came with it....
BackgroundIn this episode, we talk about that one screen all bol.com colleagues have open all day in this season period. The initial version which was born back in 2004 and got the name Ancorama. Referring to the colleague who built it. It looked like an excel sheet being updated by querying the database. A couple of years ago a new initiative was born, Real-Time Sales. It brought great new graphs. But in fact, it still wasn't Real-Time.Now we are dealing with a brand new version and it is also known as Real-Time Sales, the next generation. Our guests had a huge stake in building this version and we want to know everything about it.
Subjects* Why and when did you start the project? * How did you achieve 100ms processing time? * What building blocks used and why? + RSocket, R2DBC, Reactive programming, Vue3, Kotlin Coroutines * Test approach * Future developments
Guests
* Goos van den Bekerom; Software Engineer in the buying domain
* Marvin Zwolsman; Software Engineer in the buying domain and friend of the show! (Hey Google)
* Eugene Figueiras; Software Engineer in the Selling, Assortment and Fintech domain.
Notes
Blogpost on peak season frontend performance
Podcast on season preparations
The state of reactive streams with Oleh Dokuka
Introduction
In this episode we are sharing something that is unique at least in the Tech Community here at bol.com. To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member. Without spoiling too much, I think this contribution will make a positive impact far beyond the bol.com Tech landscape and serve in an enormous number of companies. Helping engineers all over the planet.
What this episode covers
Hoping to inspire you as well to become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member.
Our guest is the first bol.com employee to become official committer to the Apache Logging Services. A well known, widely used Free and Open Source Software project (F/OSS). The umbrella for all kinds of logging stuff including the very well-known Log4j. And timing of the recording couldn't be better. The night before Volkan received the invitation to become PMC member. The project management committee of the Apache Logging Services project.
To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member we discuss* How he started contributing to the Open Source community * What it needs to become contributor, spoiler: "you don't need to be a programmer". * How he rolled into this Apache Logging Services project * What his contribution is: JSON template layout * The value of open source * His thoughts of the future
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/13f626f4ab9c429055f0e188fce8970400ff5d7e-675x442.jpg)
Guests
* Volkan Yazici; Software engineer; PhD in Computer Engineering, Has been contributing to the search engine on our webshop and currently working on Axle our internal “framework” that cannot be called a framework. (check the podcast episode on Axle).
Notes
Personal projects: https://vlkan.com/code
Apache Logging Services projects: https://logging.apache.org/
unFTP: https://github.com/bolcom/unftp
Other bol.com F/OSS projects: https://github.com/bolcom
Project Management Committee as shown in the guidelines of Apache Logging Services
Introduction
Even if it doesn't appeal to you, you might want to think about it when you work in a larger microservice landscape or have a serious big data platform...Proof data consistency in a microservice landscape. When we google this subject I already get 1.2 MLN results so there’s something going on here.
To ensure data consistency several practices are available:
Saga Pattern
Reconciliation
Event Log
Orchestration vs. ChoreographySingle-Write With EventsChange-First
Event-First
Consistency by Design
Accepting Inconsistency
But in this episode, we won't go over these practices.
What this episode covers
We will dive into the verification part. The proof of the correct operation of your implementation.
Within bol.com we implemented a Data Quality Service (DQS). Actually, the second generation is already in place. The first generation focused on the immutable data in the 2nd improved version mutable data is covered as well. We will go over these questions to explain how we proof data consistency in a microservice landscape:
- How did we come up with our solution?
- What is our approach?
- How does it relate to our big data, BigQuery storage?
StatementsAs a starter, we discuss these statements first
- Why care it is just data...
- The microservice is not the issue, the independent data storage solution is, so let’s get back to the centralized databases (makes testing also a lot easier)
- An architect should be the guest of this show as it’s part of his/her role to fix this
- Data Consistency is not a problem for Software Engineers. It should be fixed by our infrastructure solutions
Guests
* Mykola Gurov – Of course, you all know him since he was in our very first episode about Kotlin. Or otherwise from one of his testing in production talks. Jack of all trades.
* Chris Gunnink – Software Engineer on a crusade - DQS
* Sourygna Luangsay – Tech Lead in experimentation, forecasting and the finance product a lot more products
Notes
Bigquery - bol.com adoption story
BigQuery - Google’s Data warehouse running in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Introduction
In this episode, we show a little of our front-end love. And our love for testing and enjoying the quality of a good front-end. It was time for that because the last time we talked about front end related stuff was quit some episodes ago.
What this episode covers
We are going to talk about Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application.
First, we discuss two statements/dilemmas:
- Testing is always balancing. Time vs. Quality: How much time to spent on getting all the cases (interactions) and edge cases clear vs. the level of quality.
- Testing in non-pro is overrated, Canary testing is the future
After that we will dive into the topic by going over the subjects:
- Sketching the context & share the example
- Explain the Front end architecture
- Discuss the test setup and how it is different from the rest of webshop- including tools and frameworks used
- Lessons Learned
Interaction in the checkout results in changed components
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/3e7a23158edc1c83143952c836fa1df6373c0208-1159x878.gif)
Guests
Kasper Peulen; Full Stack Engineer at bol.com
Jan Jaap Verheij; Senior Test Automation Engineer & Scrum Master
Both in the shopping domain working on the checkout.
Notes
Typescript
Storybook
Cypress
Always start your project with Typescript in strict mode.
Today we take a look behind the mask. The moment we recorded this podcast episode the 2nd wave of Corona is hitting The Netherlands. In the first wave, the Corona crisis was causing a lot of pressure and stress on our healthcare system and nurses & caretakers specifically.
With a couple of IT Young Professionals, we are helping a great project called “Behind The Mask”. It is a joint effort of UMC Utrecht, TU Delft and Erasmus MC.
What this episode covers
The project aims to help nurses maintain mental and physical health by providing an online platform where they can share experiences and stories and help each other by giving tips, support and sharing articles.
As Bol.com we are helping them with a team of Young Professionals. We are providing them with technical expertise and guidance to get this unique platform up and running.
Guests
* Nathan de Bruijn; Software Engineer in bol.com started in team Hedwig (marketing campaigns) and participant of the YP program
* Andras Herczeg; Software Engineer in bol.com and participant of the YP program, which he almost finished and friend of the show (Hackathon)
Other team members in the program are:
- Boyd Hogerheijde
- Vidjinder Hoeba
Notes
Support Behind the Mask
"This is how we do IT", is the slogan of our Techlab site and podcast. Every now and then we reach out to external guests to learn from them and exchange ideas. We are really happy to have this external guest in our show to talk about "Let's get ethical".
What this episode covers
This multi-talent released her book ‘De bubbel’ mid 2019 after 15 years at Google, Spotify and Booking.com. She writes columns for the Dutch newspaper FD. One of those was the reason for me to reach out and invite her to the show. Currently, she is advising startups and scale-ups on their commercial and marketing strategy and she is a mentor for the SVDJ Accelerator (Foundation for Dutch journalism).
In this episode, we first get to know Sanne and her career a bit better to understand where the statement "let's get ethical" comes from. We discuss her book and the story of this woman who starts her career in a start-up and get dragged into "situations that have to be shared" as Sanne explains. The redline of her journey ethics in the tech-industry unfold when we make the step to the TedX talk and her call for the moral quotient. We wrap up talking about one of her columns about 'The Platform Bitch' which resonates when she shares her takeaway:
Rethink your relationship with tech.
Guests
* Sanne Kanis: Tech & Media Executive, Ex-Spotify, Google and Booking.com, TedX Speaker, Columnist FD, Author
Notes
A call for morality in tech (TEDx talk)
Her own website including the links to all FD columns
The Netflix Documentary-Movie The Social Dilemma
Open podcast platform Podimo
The platform for kids QniQr where they can set up their own shop and manage their own money
Books:
Sanne Kanis, De Bubbel (English translation is work in progress)
Timothy Ferriss, The four work week
Timothy Ferriss, Tribe of mentors
In this episode, we touch a field that we don’t explore that much, Architecture. To be more precise: Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact. In a way, it's strange since Peter Paul has worked as an architect for quite a while.
What this episode covers
On the website of our guest, esilva.net, it's called “co-design organizational and technical systems to maximize impact”. We think there is so much to explore in these words Sociotechnical Architecture so we asked Eduardo to join this show.
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/b1d94d3dfef08a393cc6680af37d51e839904767-1596x876.jpg)
We discuss what it is and also, why it is fundamental to maximize the impact of our products and the teams building & owning them. We discuss the 5 traits:
- Conway's Law
- Team Cognitive Load
- Team Boundaries & Interrelations
- Continuous Discovery & Delivery in Team
- Understand your context & Design based on that
And to make it tangible, we discuss this topic based on the great example Eduardo uses on his website as well: 'the restaurant' and we relate to examples within the bol.com tech community.
Guests
* Eduardo da Silva; Technical Leader & Sociotechnical Software Architect at bol.com and friend of the show.
Notes
* Blog and link to Spaces Summit video on Sociotechnical Architecture
* Why and What of Sociotechnical Architecture
* Traits and Strategies of Sociotechnical Architecture
Books:
- Accelerate
- Team Topologies
Bonjour ! Félicitations messieurs, il y a seulement deux semaines, que le bol.com application multilingue est disponible dans les app-stores.That's how we started this episode. Congratulate our guests with the launch of the multilingual bol.com app. It was launched in the French-speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia.
What this episode covers
With this launch, over 5 million French-speaking Belgians were able to shop in their native language.
In this episode, we dive into this move to multilingual that started two years ago. After the 'why' and 'when' we go into the 'how'. From both an architectural and project management perspective, this is really interesting. We share the best practices and learnings and close off with a small peak in what's next.
Guests
* Jan Willem Mathijssen: Business Architect/Program Manager/Innovation lead multilingual app
* Johan Wijnmalen: IT project manager at bol.com
Notes
Bert Kruismans – Belgium celebrity
Portfolio management by agile at scale
The bol.com app on apple
The bol.com app on android
Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, is seen by a lot of people as the next logical step in developing DevOps capabilities. SRE takes concepts from software engineering and puts them to use in an operations context. Over the last 3 years, we have been experimenting with SRE approaches and gradually integrating them into our DevOps way of working.
What this episode covers
In this episode, we share the experience we gained on our journey.
Guests
* Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and external speaker and friend of the show (SRE during spaces summit 2019)
* Rob Klein Gunnewiek; System Engineer Extraordinaire and Site Reliability Engineering guru.
Notes
Bart's SRE presentation on SRE during spaces summit 2019
The starting point for SRE at Google.
Books on Site Reliability Engineering
Welcome back after the summer holidays! Hope you were able to enjoy an awesome break. We took some time to prepare some great podcast episodes for you.
Holidays, always a nice moment to reflect on things. One of the things might be your personal development and productivity.
What this episode covers
Saying yes to too many things, do these things add to my personal development, how do you keep track on all these commitments, how do you ensure you don’t drown and eventually don’t be productive at all. Sounds familiar to you these questions? Keep listening, we dive into the personal experiences with the two guests of the show.
We discuss some nice statements on personal productivity:
- If I am invited for a meeting and I don’t know my value/contribution I skip the meeting.
- I say “Yes” too easily so I need a strict WoW that helps and remind me to say no.
- There’s no I in a team but there’s an I in Winner (Team over Person or not?).
- Tools like GTD, Pomodoro etc are all useless. The only thing that matters is self-discipline.
Guests
* Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and external speaker and friend of the show (SRE during spaces summit 2019)
* Eduardo da Silva; Technical Leader & (Socio-technical) Software Architect at bol.com and friend of the show to be…. Stay tuned.
Notes
Your personal Northstar
Getting Real, by Basecamp
Share your personal goals in the team goals: Team Canvas
Gamify your life and reach your personal goals with Habitica
Write, plan and get organized with Notion.so
Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults (PPP), by August Bradley
In this episode, we take another look, a fresh perspective on Data Science for Logistics. In earlier episodes, we talked about related topics like Forecasting and crafting a Picking Algorithm using Data Science.
With the guests of this episode, we dive into two specific challenges in the warehousing domain, the cost-based selection is the first one and the second is put-away with simulation as the red line.
During the recording, we found out that our guests have a big dream: realizing the Digital Twin of the bol.com fulfilment centre. But at the same time, they are very practical and they explain how they started with the two examples and how this will eventually add up to the digital twin.
What this episode covers
To speak with them:
It would be very nice to create a digital twin of the warehouse to simulate the whole warehouse to create not local but a global optimum.
Guests
* Christianne Wisse – Data Scientist at bol.com and a professional doctorate in engineering at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS)
* Charles de Leau – Data Scientist @ bol.com with an interesting background in Logic (BA, MA Philosophy), Statistics/Science (Bsc, MSc Criminology) and Data science (National University of Singapore). He previously worked as a consultant in Sydney, Singapore and the Netherlands.
Notes
* Digital Twin - how wiki explains this
* The simulation of the put-away mechanism. It represents one zone in the fulfilment centre. Every green tile represents one closet. The greener it gets the higher the volume in that closet.
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/5824c3f2d24d53b361c91cc10e315caf303385bf-500x500.gif)
We changed roles for this unique episode. And why is that? We are going to look back on the first 55 episodes. So, Peter Paul and Peter will be the guests of this show and Niels Kuiper and Bruno Lauwers will be your host.
Our motto is 'sharing is caring'.
What this episode covers
So, practise what you preach and share the podcast journey as well. That was what we had in mind. We share how it all started over a year ago. We dive into the learnings and memorable moments. We were asked about our dreams and plans for the next 55 episodes. What did we learn from each other? We share our own favourite podcasts and of course the advice we can give to people that want to start. Spoiler: just start and have fun....
Guests
Peter Brouwers - Team manager in IT. He started as a Service Delivery Manager and is now leading one of our Site Reliability Teams, Project Leads and Software Architects.
Peter Paul van de Beek - Working as an IT team manager in bol.com. Started at bol.com as software engineer and turned to IT architect.
Notes
The favourite podcasts of Peter and Peter Paul:
BNR de Technoloog, F1 aan Tafel, over transformaties, de pacer, NOS formule 1 podcast, Ladybug podcast (EN), Echt gebeurd, Man Man Man, Land of the Giants
Top 10 Huge Podcast Mistakes
When it comes to developing software we use the adagio: You built it, You run it, You love it. Same should hold for all the -ilities or non-functional requirements. So, one should love their logging.
One of the subjects that we did not really touch yet in our podcast is non-functionals.
What this episode covers
Today we take a closer look at logging. An aspect that typically fills some of the non-functionals or -ilities. Love your logs and Love the people after you.
For the first time in the history of the bol.com Techlab podcast, we are able to provide 5 free eBooks about today's topic. Because that was the starter for this episode. We were contacted by the publisher of this book if we were interested in an episode about logging with the author of this book. So, we came up with the idea to combine it with the bol.com way of logging. During the episode, we will explain what’s needed to obtain one of these codes.
We start our logging journey talking about moving away from monoliths. This brings a challenge for logging and tracing. Next, we dive into the question: Logging for logging vs logging for alerting? All this is on the receiving end. What about the production of logging? What are the best practices for producers? And we wanted to learn how organisations deal with demanding teams. Last part is about the balancing act of engineering. And of course, we have our famous closings round: the most important takeaways.
Guests
* Phil Wilkins – has spent over 25 years in the software industry. Is a Senior Consultant and Tech Evangelist working for Cap Gemini. Specializing in cloud integration, APIs, and related technologies. Phil is TOGAF certified. Recognized by Oracle as an Ace Director (independent technology advocate) for his contributions to the integration and PaaS community. Has written a few books including the one we talk about today: Unified Logging with Fluentd.
* Tjebbe Vlieg – System Engineer, in his 4th year at bol.com and really enjoying it, strong in logging, monitoring and metrics.
Notes
* The Book: Unified Logging with Fluentd.
* ELK Stack
* fluentd
* ELK vs ELF stack
Today we explore our product architecture. We have been talking with Jim van de Waal about product organizations. We spoke to our Agile at Scale friends about product organisations and Agile at Scale. Now it is time to talk about the foundation to build these on.
What this episode covers
We call this the product architecture.
We believe that a lot of companies are in the same transformation. Years ago we dealt with a 'monolith architecture'. We transformed this architecture in a 'microservices architecture'. And now it's time for the next logical step in evolution: the transition into a 'product architecture'. We discuss why it is needed and what it will solve. We asked our guests about the steps we took so far and the first pilots we are starting. Above all we wanted to know what we learnt so far. If you want to leave a reaction, go to Twitter @bol_com_Techlab, mail us at techlab@bol.com or reach out to the hosts directly.
Guests
* Marcel van Leeuwen – Enterprise Architect and Agile Transformation Program Manager.
* Ronald Pulleman – Architect and software alchemist.
* Robert-Jan Ostermann – Architect, one of the masterminds crafting our product architecture.
Notes
* Product organizations
* Agile at Scale
* Product organisations
* Software Parade - Creating an overview of hundreds of (micro-) services.
Update 11th march 2021
This week started with the International Womens Day. #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021
We wanted to start a new experiment so that's why we started the experiment with this episode.We want to add automated transcription to our posts. Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge but unfortunately people who are deaf or hearing impaired are excluded.
What this episode covers
That is not what we want.
IntroductionOnce again we are sharing our diversity and inclusion stories. We discuss how women in tech at bol.com encourage inclusion in tech. The idea for this podcast stems from of course the importance of the subject but also from the diversity and inclusion month we have at bol.com. In June and November last year we spoke about diversity and women in tech in the podcast with several guests. Let’s see what the latest developments and insights are, given that there has been a lot of attention to the subject in the world around us in the last weeks.
In our opinion, we need to keep having these conversations to progress. So, we will probably share more in future episodes.
Guests
* Natalia Paratsikidou – Software engineer in the bol.com retail media group (BRMG) domain
* Anastasija Efremovska – Software engineer in the platform domain and 'best friend of the show'
* Marloes Kuijper – Data scientist in the assortment domain
* Raissa Machado – Software engineer working on the select proposition, the bol.com subscription model
* Maartje van Denderen – Front-end developer in the area of assortment tooling for partners
Notes
Talks during spaces summit 2020:Making Demos great again - MarloesFrom prototype to production. A real-life cloud story - AnastasijaExperience the hive mind through Mob Programming - Natalia; this session is not on Youtube. It was a hands-on session based on the Kata principle
Earlier Episodes about Women in Tech:Our speakers during the Women in tech conferenceIntercultural Diversity
TranscriptionPlease be aware: the transcription has been produced by an automated process.
Thanks.
Yeah, do you have this podcast stems from the course, of
course, from the importance of the subject, but also from the
diversity and Inclusion month we have had both. Com and also in
June and November last year. In both cost we spoke about
diversity and women in tech.
In several cases. Let's see what are the latest
developments and insight, especially given that there
are some other has been a lot of attention for the subject
in the world around us in the last week.
Yes, yes, an inclusion is one of the subjects I remember well
from our podcasts. Mary was sharing her story about feeling
excluded and the talk she had about inclusion with our former
CEO. And during that interview, but also during the editing
again after it, it gave me the goosebumps. So I'm really
curious right now how it is in
this talk. And in this talk we want to define in two. So P, X2
parts we start first with diversity and inclusion, and in
this case the women in tech them order generic story an to make
it more concrete week off to the second part based on the
examples about the talks during space. Assuming so, baseball
time to introduce the guests.
Yeah, and then we have quite a list of guess. I don't think
that we ever had to so many guess so so that's I think that
also stresses the importance of this. So let me first introduce
Natalia Paratsikidou, software engineer in
the in the BMG. So that's basically where we sell
advertisements on our platform.
Yeah, great to be here. I'm really happy and I I was like
I'm on my maternity leave. But I was like I find it really
important to share my experience. So thank you very
much for inviting.
Anastasija Efremovska, she's software engineer, as she saw on her
LinkedIn profile that she like to likes to make me break
things. So I was curious about these lines in the profiles, but
if you're if you have listened to the podcasts a lot, then you
know that she was actually in one of our first. I think
actually the first port costs when our equipment was way less
than this and we were just starting out so.
Yeah, really cool to have you back.
Yeah, uh, thank You Beautiful. It's it's great to
be back. It's actually the third time I think the
previous presented part of this.
How can I yeah?
Best friends of the exactly best Friends of podcasts.
Glad to be back, yes.
Marloes Kuijper, data scientist in the
assortment domain, I know from other teams that there's a lot
going on in the Serpent domain for data scientist. So great to
have you as well.
Thank you very much Peter. Well, thanks for having me. I'm really
looking forward to this.
Raissa Machado, also a software engineer, this
is in the team reptile and it's on the select proposition. So if
I'm correct, the select subscription where we offer
certain things to Members for
platform. Yes, yes, that's right. That's me. Hi
everyone, very glad to be here and uh, if you're not
a member of select please go and buy a subscription.
So now we have also posted sponsored content.
They collected via the BRG stuff I guess, but we'll talk
about that later and then a last cause guest of today is
Maartje van Denderen she's fronted the developer and
given this chest in education in journalism, think debating
and I will learn a lot during this podcast says we don't.
She's look she's working on assortment tooling for our
partners on the platform
welcome. Yes, thank you very much nice to be here.
Great.
So, um, yeah.
Jim Diversion and Inclusion month. Why is it so
important in both com.
Yes, so the diversity and Inclusion Month is something
that came out out of the diversity and inclusion work
group that has on the lines of 10 people working on this.
Nowadays we think it's really important to raise awareness
throughout the company regarding the topic, so we need to speak
about this and do something that's not like a onetime
campaign but rather a continuous continuous cause that we put
effort and we tried to develop further and further. So that's
why we're trying to raise awareness throughout the
company. So that more people can see the importance of this
subject and can also join the group and help us build
something more concrete.
Can you give an example what we what we did in that month? Well,
yes, of course. So the month was divided in four weeks. The first
week was focused on awareness, so we shared a lot of numbers
regarding awareness as a more abstract topics or a general
topic. And then we will go then into the teams. So we had the
women in Tech Week. We had the pride Week and the International
Week and for every week we had a small special activity. So
either a lunch session or a talk of the international.
Or kind of like a coffee blind date. We also had the pub quest
to wrap up the month, which you guys probably heard of. It was
the first fully online event that we organized. I think we
had close to 400 people joining so it was quite big.
And we're really proud of the the month in general, because
after that we got a lot of people reaching out, starting
the conversation and just saying, hey, I would like to
help. How can I help and that's what we look for more people to
become engaged. And I think we really we really 'cause we
really made him an impact and that was really amazing I I'm
really proud of it.
And you said that in the beginning you shared some
numbers. How to spell.com compared to other companies in
the Netherlands? Could you share a little on that? Yes, of
course. So I think some numbers we are still below the national
average. So regarding women in tech we were last time that I
checked 1.5% below the national
average. But women as a whole in the company, we are 41%, so
that's quite an OK number.
And, um. Let me see if there are other numbers that I have
from the top of my head. Maybe I should have prepared better.
Turn on.
I'm sorry logo.
Overall we are not doing a.
That bad if we only take the numbers into account, of course
numbers not always give the full the full answer, right?
Exactly because then again, this would be my remark. This is just
the numbers. But that's very different than it
feels sometimes. I can imagine exactly yes.
Yes, and also it may be interesting to see that the
women in tech will Bolt form is so short of around average for
the country, but there's a country in in general, the
Netherlands is doing pretty bad on the how many women and
network in depth, and this is actually something that we
really would like to improve so that yeah we have more women in
tech services and Isabel, it's gonna be a really big company.
So because there are.
Relatively prime, quite a lot of women insect, but this is really
something we can do to make an
impact. To show that I pay this something we both won't find
really important, and maybe we can also inspire some people to
think about a career in tech if they haven't done that before.
Yeah, I knew there was a women in tech.
Community you can you came up with this statement you worked
on that together with, uh, our people end Department I believe
and and I think it was even that
aborts that. Signed the statement right, can you can
tell more about the statement? But what did we put on paper?
Yes, of course. So when we were first starting, the community
marching and I we had a very clear idea of what we wanted the
community to be like. But we felt that having only our own
opinions was not enough to build a very strong, long lasting,
relevant community. So we organize a kick up session last
year where we invited.
Everyone to participate and give their opinions and together with
Susanna, here's help. We had a workshop and we gathered a lot
- Heard from everyone on what they felt the community
should represent. And while we should stand for, and
that's how we came up with the women in tech statement
that is based on three pillars we have the encourage
pillar, the share pillar, and the diversified pillar and
the idea under each of those pillars is that the encourage
session. The encourage pillar is where we.
Together as a community, we do some networking. We build
bridges. We try to be authentic, open and vulnerable, but most
importantly we listen and we have been doing monthly meetings
where we just have lunch together and we just have a safe
space where everyone can can support each other. That has
been really successful so far.
And then under the share pillar we we're working on
inspiration sessions because we do know we have so many
amazing women working inside the company that are really
working that their * off. Sorry for my language, but
that's true really being very innovative and just being
game changers and we want to create a platform where those
women can just tell their stories so that they also
inspire other women and everyone actually too.
Perform their jobs better by just sharing the their life
stories. They can also just make a very positive impact on the
community in general and then we have the diversified pillar.
And the idea there is that we embrace the uniqueness of all
people. So we want to be very aware of biases and we want to
be also very inclusive, which means that this Community is not
only for women, is for everyone. Because we do understand that
there is no way that will change the status quo if we only have
women involved. So if you are a man and you're listening to this
podcast and you want to get involved, please reach out
because we need your help. And I think that by having everyone's
perspective, that's how we can.
Actually make a positive impact and create a change on the
company and on the environment around us. And actually I also
want to give just a quick shout out to Timon from recruitment
because he has been working with us already and then that's
really positive and we need more
people like that. Yeah, so they embraced the uniqueness of all
people and that's that's the diversified pillar one.
OK, and then this statement was put on paper and then our board
member Ellen said, OK, this is that important. I want to sign
it off an want to be part of it as well, right? It's how kind of
exactly so we're really proud and we think it's really great
that we have this this kind of support from directors as well.
Great, great to see in here. Yeah and then.
Yeah, maybe that's a nice bridge. Of course, if you
talk about sharing and inspire other is is dead,
then where the if you talk about our spaces Summit?
And then we have this this yearly event. This time it was
online. You should hear the listen to the other episode. We
talked about it and in this space summit tree women stood up
and said I want to present over there and that's the bridge here
and I think. I'm
yeah, can you share something about your presentation? An
yeah. But why did you choose the topic before we go to women in
tech relationship again?
Wants to start.
I can start um, so the presentation I've
participated in a few conferences and.
They always had Carter involved as a workshop or of as of
a talk, and I thought, oh, that's a great topic to do at
ball. So can you hear me? I'm not sure I lost it. OK so.
Sorry.
That's how the idea came up. I participated in a Carter
workshop talk in Tenerife in Socrates Internet, so I
thought I can do it. I have the knowledge why not and
that's how it came in, but I really want to share a first
and foremost that I couldn't have done. It actually didn't
do it, but the workshop.
Was held by Duncan Lou and it wouldn't have been possible if.
This amazing colleague for me wasn't there to support me and
actually we did it together so I wasn't alone. I'm here to
present it. It was indeed my idea, but I had help and I
think it's there. It is well with what I said that we are a
community. We need to help each other to go further.
OK, cool.
I'm a loose yeah, those are really nice where it's a Natalia
yeah for me I presented on stream net which is an
application framework in Python which makes it really easy to
create really nice visual demos from scratch in like very short
amount of time. And basically it might seem we do a lot of
product discovery which means we do a lot of presentations to
stakeholders and to the team itself and streamed. It really
helps us a great deal because it allows us to really quickly set
up visually appealing and
interactive demos. And so the reason why I wanted to present
on this is basically to share my knowledge on. It's an it's.
It's a pretty new tool so not many people knew about it yet,
so I really wanted to make sure that everybody in the community
knows about it and can also use it to their advantage.
Cool.
But it's always nice to hear that that we can share
knowledge, and I think it's a
great opportunity. And that kind of also inspired me for
my presentation, because it's not really the stage
fright that kept me from presenting. I feel like I
was struggled to find a topic that I think would be
relevant for people and that people would have something
new to hear.
So this year I thought we actually had the perfect
opportunity. So together with my colleague Karen, we present it
on our internal infrastructure to called R2D2. You can also
check out their podcasts. By the way, Karen and your own from my
team. They talked about the art of data two awhile back on the
podcast and it has actually existed for a few years and we
have quite a new collection in the company so we thought it
would be nice to tell the story
- How did it come to be and what were the decisions made
three years ago? And what would you maybe do differently if you
do did it today?
So yeah, that was the motivation behind those three
presentations. I believe we also put them on online on YouTube,
so insurance, we will add the links of course, but the debt so
far that the topic thing you can see that it's already 3 totally
different topics. So that's interesting. But yeah.
What was it that you?
Yeah I wanted to present something during spaces submit
and especially this subject.
For me it was in Italian for me. It was mainly because I I
was missing the CATA mindset in the bowl.com conferences in our
environment. In general I found it a great way for me to
open up and meet people and see different ideas an also
cultivate a lot for me. It helped me cultivate my.
Um software engineering practices. I think it made me a
better software engineer, so I wanted to bring it to ball.
Some are loose. Yeah, so for me. Like I said it was mainly about
sharing knowledge, but I also wanted to kind of show off the
things that the cool things that my team is doing which we're
proud of. And also I wanted to really push myself a bit, so I'm
not really usually. I'm not ready to the person who goes to
speak at conferences. In fact it was my first conference talk.
And yeah, I kind of wanted to get out of my comfort zone and
be like, yeah, why not? Why why shouldn't I do this? I mean,
it's cool and I have something
to say so. Yeah, let's try.
Attitude really wants to do this yourself that it comes from you
or did someone push you a little too to take this step.
I think it was mainly me. I don't think anybody was really
pushing me, but together with a couple of teammates we were all
really excited about space submit and a couple of my
colleagues also submitted some abstract. So yeah, that also
helped. So we were in it together, so to speak. Yeah, so,
so it really helps if other people in your environment are
also doing it, because that is more easy to to also participate
and wanted to be out there on
stage, right? Yeah, exactly yeah definitely.
Cool.
And for under. Ask him what was
your. Motivation your drive.
Yeah, so on one hand we've been receiving a lot of questions
about R2D2, so we wanted to take this opportunity to answer some
of them. And also it's made us a bit more transparent. I find on
what we're doing to the rest of
the company. An to a kind of add on Marluxia story. It was a bit
too. I wanted to practice my presentation skills, but my
colleague Karen also wanted to do the same. So this is a really
nice opportunity to do it together and also hold each
other responsible of its two to make it good and to share the
load. So I really like that. Yeah, so it's a combination of.
Yeah, really present about the the topic, the content, an
combination of the development, personal development. So you
want to make a next step in
presentation, etc. So, um.
Yeah, if you're connected with your ex and your experience with
the other questions and if you if you look at the number of
women presenting during spaces submit, it's really unknown
number. Um?
Can you explain it based on your experience?
Yeah, so maybe I'll start this time. I think from from myself
at least I I always struggle a bit to find a topic as I said
that I think people would be
interested in. So I think as women we maybe try to be a bit
perfectionist and really find the really nice thing and
something that hasn't been done
before. And we really try to have a topic that's really good
or in other safe or whatever, But that's that. Doesn't have to
be always the case. I've noticed I've been to many conferences
where where you can hear very niche sort of things that maybe
have been discussed.
And they are not necessarily your topic of interest, but
there are somebody's topic of interest, so you can always
find people that are interested in what you have
to say. And just because you're not good at that
certain topic doesn't make you good in another topic, so
you should think that probably you have something
interesting to say.
I think that's my experience.
For you and Marloes, yeah, so I also agree I can relate to what
under Stasya saying. I also think it can be quite daunting
to present at a conference. I mean it's it's one thing to
present for your team, but it's another to present for the whole
tech community, right? So and that's not just for women, but
that's also for men. And I think you know there are quite a few
people who have done this like many times who are very
confident in. Presenting we're very comfortable. And then
there's also a very large group in the tech community
who have never done that before who don't feel like
really comfortable presenting for a large audience and.
So I think we already have a lot of like a big support
system in place, but I think making sure that everybody
knows that it's there that there is a lot of support and
that is a very safe community to present in is really,
really important, and I think that could be very powerful
thing to do moving forward.
For you to tell you it's similar experiences or I
like I couldn't agree more with an assassin marlous.
Really, I felt exactly the same way.
One extra thing that I notice is that the reason why in ball, but
also in other companies, I do believe that ball is doing quite
a good job. Let's say based on my previous experience, is the
way a company presents itself.
So I also I have an experience in a conference that someone
asked me. Would you like to talk a bit to us about women in tech?
And I was like why? What can we do to increase what they would
do it? What can we do to get you into our company? And I was like
look for personally for me. And of course this is Natalia
speaking. It's different per person. If I see that the
company is presenting itself full of men and predominantly
like how strong they are and
how. Like getting it all out there. I would feel a bit scared
that not scared that all will go there and what am I gonna do?
But mostly like are my idea is gonna be heard. Is there space
an enough security let's say for every different idea to be
cultivated and I think that's the most important thing and I
think it that is also diversity is not only about women in tech
is about different perspectives.
And ways of thinking.
And because my loose mentioned the feeling safe
and also about presenting at a conference like the Space
Summit Diffie, in your opinions, do a good enough
job there so that you could feel safer. Or should we
still take additional steps to make it even better?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think like I said, we have a
really nice support system in the tech community. There's
the walk-in sessions for speakers. You know, there's a
presentation course that you can take, so there's already a
lot of things going on, but of course we don't really know.
This is in the case of very few female presents, as we don't
really know why it is that there are so very few female
presenters, so I think there could still be. You know there
are a lot of questions still unanswered and I think that
would be my suggestion in figuring out what those answers
are. You know, like maybe collecting data through survey,
figuring out if people are willing to or women are willing
to present next year and why.
It is that they will or why they don't want to go an. You
know, collecting some feedback, asking the
important questions like you know what is it that we can
do to help? What are things that are fair? What are
holding you back? And if we have answers to all those
questions, we can determine what are the next important
steps and if we're doing a good enough job, I think.
What was it already a topic and maybe now looking a bit
more to my tan? He said in the women in tech group?
Number of women sharing their stories in space, assuming there
wasn't. I'm not sure, but we are preparing a session for the end
of this month where we intend to do exactly this survey so.
Individually, I have been speaking to a few women so I
have an idea of what might be. You know the issue there, but we
want to gather more more inside
- We intend to do that during one of the lunch sessions. Just
have an anonymous survey so that they can answer and hopefully
will find more concrete things
to tackle. Yeah, but it was not not some discussion
already up front. For instance, during the request
for proposals that unfortunately now.
That's that's good to realize.
So it wasn't inside. You got during their spaces, summits
that there were really few women in doing this presentation.
Um?
Yeah, of course if there are in general will be more women
working in tech then of course you can expect the number we've
been presenting in the present in the conference is also be
larger so. Yeah, that's of course the currency
problem, right?
Should we do as a company something specific on that site
should be you've been talking to time and already, but should we
do something in the way we publish our vacancies?
That's boots.
Easier accessible.
Uh, for non white men, let's let's put it like that.
I think he has been very busy working on that specifically, so
basically going through all the copy so the very small things
the way that you write stuff you have to be very careful not to
use like very.
Not to put gender as a very big role there. Also one thing that
we notice while we were on the women's at conference last year
in Amsterdam we had some pamphlets. We had a booth. We
were there as a company as Balakan and we had a group and
we had some pamphlets to showcase the company and while
we realize while we were at the conferences that the pamphlet
only had pictures of men and we were in a women in tech
conference. So that was, you know one of the things.
We should definitely work on if we want to showcase the
diversity that we already have in sideball, then we should be
paying more attention to those small details for sure. Another
thing that we have been.
Working together with recruitment is making sure that
every time that we have a female engineer on the process on the
recruitment process, now we make sure that she she meets with at
least one female engineer as well so that she knows that
there are also female engineers working at the company and she
can feel more, perhaps more safe or more relaxed during the
interview process to maybe ask questions or just identify
herself a little bit more.
If I may add something on that, um, I think from my perspective
we should also be a bit careful because we don't want to
segregate the whole. The subject of recruitment, so I think we
have to be careful with the pamphlets and with the wording,
including diversity, diversity, but not really be targeted as of
we're trying to improve to increase our seats.
Of how many women we have? Becausw yeah, we're trying to
promote uh, self more into that area. Becausw. Speaking from
experience I have heard from a lot of female engineers at Ball
event that they don't want to be identified as of something
different. They just want to an I. I feel the same as well. I
want to be part I don't wanna be something separate.
So it's more about inclusion, I think.
But that's kind of hard if you're.
And it's it's needed to to to pay attention to, so that's why
we have this women in tech statement and we have you
explained the three pillars but all the other or the other
hands. You know you want to be one team and it in fact you
saying it shouldn't be necessary? Is that what you
mean? It's yes, because then it becomes too much. Yes, because
we saw it with the international community as well. That it some
point. People, don't you need everyone to work together, so
you need everyone to identify with that and.
I I don't want to feel that I have special treatment and I
think that people in tech want to feel empowered because of the
no let's not be cause someone.
Made them a favor. Let's say that that is
not the hardest thing.
And how with hiring people, right? Let's the most.
The hard thing at the moment, because a lot of companies are
thinking about how are we going to make our company more
diverse, but you have to put some effort, but nobody wants
to be the first be higher. So how are you gonna make sure
that you do? Having heard the first thing but at the same
time that people don't feel like they are different to the
higher and that's really hard I think. And the main thing to
do is to make sure that in even the BSS that we're really
inclusive company and that's everybody feels welcome and.
Yeah, definitely. I think the trick there is that we should be
aware of the biases on our recruitment process. So there is
this very cool study that Air BNB performed with their
recruitment process. They removed the names and the gender
from the the.
Thank you from the CVS and then they notice that a lot
more women were going through the pipeline. So just by
removing the gender, they already notice that there was
an implicit bias there that no one was noticing. And that's
that's the type of thing that we we try to work on as well.
Just removing our own biases.
Especially from the bonds that we we think we are, we don't
have, but it proves you have to do by doing it like this.
But this example amazing if you think about it.
Now I just once smoke way question for the topic for about
spaces. Some it again before we go to the closing runs already.
What especially for spaces some it is needed. Then we talked
about some recruitment examples already. What is for space
submit needed to attract more women? What do you think?
I think, um, I think it's good to include or to promote a bit
more first time speakers we notice by talking with Marty
Heiser that a lot of us were just the first time that we
present it. So I think the coming years it's good to have a
bit of a campaign of helping out the first time speakers. So
maybe in the survey we can.
Ask everyone OK, what? What are your interests? What would you
like to present for instance? And then we can see from there.
But other incidents interest maybe on the women side or on
the men's side than yeah, if you have presented before. If not,
think that's how we could be inclusive, but not only
specifically promoting an yeah
agenda. OK. Yeah, I think so too. I think that's a
really nice way to look at it to promote people
who would normally not present to to actually go
and get up on that stage.
Yeah, so for instance you could. Like I said there are many
experienced speakers out there who would probably love to coach
someone who's never spoken at a conference before. So in that
way you could also leverage those that knowledge that's in
the organization to help someone make that final order that
needed Step 2 to present. And yeah, and I think the survey
that's going to be.
Sent out by Asia on like women, presenting at Safe
Spaces, Summit is also a really good step forward.
I cannot agree more and I think having the I took this
here the preparation workshop that we organize usually for
presenters an I must recommend it and I think it would be
nice if we promote that and with more throughout the year
and not pursue only be for a conference. Come by. That way
we give people a bit more time and a bit more leisure to kind
of do it in a less stress way or in less time pressure.
I think the water I'm going to do a circle. I think it is
really like important that maybe that's also a key to success.
Having more simulation throughout the year, not having
to wait Spaces Summit for the presentations. Wehavetheball.com
meetups also. Uh, personally, I haven't really seen how this
process goes and how you can reach out. What can. What are
the topics that you could present or other small internal
initiatives? Yeah, other talks as well. That's amazing. Yeah
yeah, I mean like speaking like anything else, like writing cold
or whatever, or flexing your muscles is a muscle that you
need to get comfortable with so.
Taking any opportunity you can, you can find to present.
I think it's a very nice practice for anybody.
And if you're scared of presenting and I would like to
visual thing, you can also contact your favorite podcast
house and say, hey, I've got an interesting topic for you and
then that would also could be for our number, so that would
would benefit us both so.
But getting more serious on this phone which you
have any recommendations for beta and myself?
Uh, yeah. Also to work on diversity. Is there something in
our approach why we are having the people in our show that we
have in our show?
Or do you have any ideas on that?
I think just from the fact that you we do that in English and
that means that we are reaching out to the whole of the end. For
me, it's really important. Whatever it's happening in
English, I really feel as part of the family. I think that we
saw is amazingly inclusive because even from the beginning
there were diverse people there. I think it's percentage wise is.
Kind of help Alpha based on knowledge and experience in
gender and cultural background so.
I also like that the topics are quite mixed, so they're not
strictly very technical. Sometimes attach a bit on social
topics to like like the Imposter Syndrome podcast you had
recently. It's just maybe something you see in tech a lot,
but it's a more general topic. I think it's nice to have a bit of
a wacky topic now and then and just be you have a crazy thing
you've been thinking about? Do you think it's worthy?
Tell me something really fun, yeah?
Alright, now maybe it's going to to go to the closing round
trip and fall. What do you think? I think it's time for
that. Yeah, so so good you'll share your your your key
takeaway here with the audience please.
Well for me, um for me the most important thing was
that although
I had an idea and I was really convinced that I would like to
present it this time after all these years football and then I
was pregnant and from the beginning it was obvious that I
wasn't being able. I wouldn't be able to present it, so I had the
great help from Duncan Luann. Actually, I think that even if I
wasn't on maternity leave, it would have been.
Great from the beginning to share it with someone else
and do it together and I really wouldn't have done it
without him. It was a collaborative effort and I
would like to suggest to everyone to try to talk to
other people and do it together.
OK.
Nice yeah I completely agree. I think that's a
really nice way to do presentations and talks for
- I think the key takeaway is that.
We all really like Spaces Summit, but there's always
things that are up for improvement and I think it's
really nice that we are reflecting and that we are
bringing it to the table and that we are talking about this.
And I think only in that way you can really make make things even
better. And yeah, there are a lot of cool things happening, so
I'm really looking forward to next year Space Summit to see
see what we come up with.
Yeah, for me it would be if you want to present but you don't
have an idea, think about it. I'm pretty sure you can find
something interesting that doesn't look interesting at
first view, but many more people would be actually happy to hear
about it. So ask around then you'll see you'll find a nice
topic to talk about.
OK.
And from their women in tech community drivers Martin Heise,
what about you?
Yeah, so I would like to see our community playing a more
prominent role in engaging more women towards presenting. So as
we mentioned before, maybe creating a safe space where they
can practice doing those throughout the year. Also, just
assessing perhaps the underlying issues that are not very clear
right now, so I would like to see the community taking a more
active role in that manner.
Yes, I totally agree with that.
And my personal takeaways near me that I have to
present next year.
Postponing it so yes.
Cool.
Yeah so Yep, thanks for your time to share this with with us
and with with you all this I I believe it's really good to do
an explain what you came up with this statement with the three
pillars but encouraged by Sharon diversity, but also about the
stories about the space Summit
talks an. And I like already. I see kind of red
line in and do it together.
Lower the the your own barrier to to do so and and start small
and the space time. It's an internal summit, but you can
also use other internal ones before you go out standing, so
that's also great to hear. Really interesting in what comes
out of the.
The inventory that you want to do the the questionnaire survey.
And I'm also interested if somebody is listening that wants
to share thoughts, and if it's internal bullet come, you know
how to find out workplace, but if it's outside bullet come you
can send email to tacklefootball.com or you can
come to the Twitter account or send it to us. Or maybe to you
as well. So share your ideas on this that would be also very
nice I believe. So yeah, the food for thought I would would
say, but also it's we started off with women in tech, but then
it became diversity in tech.
And yeah, it it's there's a lot of stuff to talk about again, so
so thank you, yeah.
Thank you very much Sir. Thanks for having us.
Very much here. Yeah, that was great.
Ever since we recorded the podcast about Agile @ Scale, we wanted some of the people involved again in our show. We care about the topic. Think there is a lot to tell and learn.
What this episode covers
And it is of interest to a lot of our listeners. That is why at least we think it is awesome that this episode is about Innovation Rhythm - How to drink less coffee and achieve more.
In the first Agile@Scale episode we talked about the 'Why' of Agile@Scale, the flight levels of Klaus Leopold. OGSM and OKR processes and the first step of this transition. We talk July 2019, so time to find out what happened since.
Guests
* Judith Verkerk – People Lead in Retail Technologies at bol.com; She is in the show because of her contributions as Domain Lead for Retailer bol.com in the group of Domain Leads.
* Hessel de Gelder – Agile Innovation Lead at bol.com. Given that this is the second appearance in our podcast he now is “Friend of the show”.
Notes
Another episode on Agile @ Scale
Business Agility
OGSM process (Objectives/Goals/Strategies/Measurements)
OKR format (objectives and key results)
Almost a year ago we spoke to Jim van der Waal, a former colleague and now working as a Product Manager at OneFootball. Back then he had just delivered his presentation: “Scary close to autonomous teams” during the Spaces Summit 2019.
Recently Jim posted a range of blog posts, with topics like:
Product Owner vs. Product Manager: what is the difference?
Making SLO’s fast
Product Teams: striving for Autonomy & reaching for Business Agility
Which triggered questions like: Would the teams be fully autonomous now? How are things with Jim? What did Onefootball discover and learn this year?.
Guests
Jim van der Waal; now works as Product Manager at Onefootball in Berlin. Before that, he started as Information Analyst in 2014 at bol.com and built up a broad experience in roles like Scrum Master, IT Project Manager and Product Owner. Always engaged with how can I improve the product, the organization and ... himself.
Notes
Jims blogs on medium.com
In this episode, we are exploring a topic that is definitely work-related but not that tech-related: Dealing with stress in the tech sector. At bol.com we have at least twice a year an employee engagement survey. Some of the questions are about how the workload is perceived.
What this episode covers
If you look at the results they differ per domain. So, context is very important. As is being pressured by deadlines.
Our guest reached out to us with the following message:"For all of us working in the tech sector most of us have felt the presence of anxiety from time to time. Especially when a big project has a hard deadline which cannot be pushed further in the future, or maybe sometimes due to the pressure we put on ourselves in order to "show the world we're capable and worth our position". Of course this subject can be way more relatable in nowadays where the pandemic has hit the world causing us to change our work habits, which might cause drops in productivity. Sometimes this anxiety has got me as well and that was the starting the point for doing small research into finding out easy tips & tricks that can help a person cope with the stress in the tech factor. So here's a list of tips and tricks split into two categories: a) How to cope with anxiety, b) how to prevent it from building up"
So we dove into this topic and found out there's a lot to tell and explore it.Indeed we touch upon 4 tips and tricks to cope with anxiety. Next to that we discuss our own experiences and relate them to prevention and even trends.
Guests
* George Katsikopoulos; a friend of the show! Young Professional and Software Engineer switched teams since the last episode from the Fintech domain into the Offer domain
Notes
The Imposter Syndrome; seen as one of the causes of stress
Spaces Summit in corona time means Spaces Summit goes virtual. Maybe you remember from last year that we have an annual internal tech conference at bol.com. Given the measures, in place, we can’t come together.
What this episode covers
So, we go for a digital online equivalent. We wanted to know what it takes to organise an event like this?
But we found out there's an even more important step before. It's getting the answer to the question "what are we going to do?" Many people and organisations who are organizing conferences, meetups, summits and other gatherings will recognize this. The preparation already started months before the date of the event. And than Corona kicked in and it wasn't safe and allowed anymore to do this event. So there's this question "what are we going to do?"
We start with a brief explanation of the Space Summit, what is it and why are we doing this in bol.com? After that, we dive into this "what are we going to do?" question. After the decision to go virtual, our guests explain what it takes and takes differently to arrange everything for this virtual edition.
Guests
* Michaela aus dem Spring – Tech Community Builder
* Kostas Mavrikis – Software engineer and organising the Spaces Summit
* Niels Kuiper – Software engineer and Cloud liaison, also in last years edition in the podcast about Spaces Summit so a friend of the show!
Notes
Podcast Spaces Summit 2019 Part I and Part II
The platform used for broadcasting the streams: Microsoft Teams Events
The platform used for gathering the audience in a virtual way Google Chat for business
The topic of this show is exactly why we like to be the hosts of this podcast. We learn a lot about all areas in our business. In this show, we dive into the marketing domain.
What this episode covers
We will learn about models like multi-touch, lift studies, time decay, and more. We talk about Data Science for Marketing Attribution.
Put simply, marketing attribution is the analytical science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. And then there is a Data Science twist to this.
Guests
* Ernst Kuiper; Data Scientist and Craft Lead Data Science
* Ivan Budincevic; Senior Software Engineer Data Science
Notes
Ivan refers to measuring 2.0 (M2) Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements; this episode discusses the source which is used for Marketing Attribution.
Search Engine Advertising and and Search Engine Optimization (SEA and SEO)
Bol.com afiliate partner program (APM)
Turning to business analytics this episode, we discover it’s a broad field. Business Intelligence hasn't been discussed that much yet in our podcast. So, we are excited to learn more.
What this episode covers
In an earlier episode, we discussed moving our Big Data platform to the cloud. This blog is described how we move our data platform into the cloud.
What tools do we need to get the data out and have all our users use it to their advantage? One of the tools is Tableau and together with our guests of the show, we dive into everything around this theme. How to become data-driven? What is the role of the data coach? How can you become scaleable? The road to self-service BI, etc.
Guests
* Frans Poldervaart – Data coach and “Analytics Ambassador”
* Willem Bekkers – Business Intelligence specialist / Data Coach
Notes
Tableau; the BI tool used by 50% of the company to do their daily analysis
Atscale; the layer in between BigQuery and Tableau
BigQuery; Google’s Data warehouse running in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Information Lab; the company we work together with to grow and benefit even more from the tableau usage.
Tableau Blueprint; the blueprint which is used as guidance
Let’s look at another programming language we use at bol.com: Python. At bol.com we use Python for Tools, Data Science and more. It has been around since 1991.
What this episode covers
It was created by a Dutch guy: Guido van Rossum. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. The language's core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Readability counts.
All well, but what do we do with it? What do we use it for?
In the earlier episode “How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2” we discussed the Deployment tool we built for our Software Engineers. This tool has been built in Python.
But we do more great stuff in bol.com with python, at least that’s what we heard in our tech community. We asked around and, not surprisingly, ended up in the Data Science area. So time to introduce our guests to the show….
Guests
* Olaf Meuwese – A software engineer who has worked mostly with and in Data Science teams in the last years.
* Bas Dunn – Data scientist, econometrician in Assortment and earlier in Partner Performance Management.
* Jasper Adegeest - Data scientist, since September 2019 at bol.com in the Personalization team.
Notes
The zen of Python
Pythonic: When a veteran Python developer (a Pythonista) calls portions of code not “Pythonic”, they usually mean that these lines of code do not follow the common guidelines and fail to express its intent in what is considered the best (hear: most readable) way.
SKlearn: Machine learning module for Python
Tensorflow: The core open source library to help you develop and train ML models
Datawarehouse bigquery
Jupyter Notebook: The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
Flask: a lightweight WSGI web application framework
Fastapi: a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.
Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design
Axle - the opinionated framework to build Java apps within bol.com
Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH) and adapting our way of working.
What this episode covers
So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences.
We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects:
- Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times.
- Episode Season load: What are the Consequences of the Corona measurements on our e-commerce platform and IT systems.
- Episode Way of Working: How we moved from 1 office into 2000 offices and how our 600 people tech community adapted to this new reality.
As e-commerce player we are in the fortunate situation we can continue working and we can even contribute to helping people stay safe. The question, how do we facilitate all this from a tech perspective and even still innovate with our innovation teams? How do we adapt our way of working to this new normal?
As bol.com we tend to be working closely together on the same physical location. We want everyone who contributes in and to the team as close as possible. In these circumstances that isn’t possible. So, what did we adapt? We have been taking measures for over a month now. Time to look back, reflect and share some learnings and good practices.
Please be aware: This episode was recorded on the 30th. of March at the beginning of the 3rd. week WFH.We are fully aware that in the 4th. week, as we are in right now, WFH normalizes but differences between people in teams are visible. Energy levels aren't as high as the first weeks.
Guests
* Burgert Kirsten – Coach or as we introduced him in a previous episode Human Systems Architect. Not sure whether you’ll be able to tell during this episode but with a love for improv theatre.
* Marijn Goedegebure – Software engineer. Interested in Visual Impact.
Notes
Trilogy Part I
Trilogy Part II
Jamboard
Burgert referred to a company which has WFH by design with over 1100 employees by now. This company is automattic. Known from Wordpress. One of their statements: "Everyone works from the location they choose. We’re spread out all over the world in more than 70 countries". The podcast Burgert is referring to is called Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris.
Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH).
What this episode covers
So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences.
We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects:
- Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times.
- Episode Season load: What are the Consequences of the Corona measurements on our e-commerce platform and IT systems.
- Episode Way of Working: How we moved from 1 office into 2000 offices and how our 600 people tech community adapted to this new reality.
In the second episode of our trilogy, we talk about season mindset. This period isn't a peak in a normal year. Being an online business we see people moving from offline to online for an additional part of their shopping. What happens in such a scenario to an e-commerce site like bol.com’s? Our guests guide you through it.
Guests
Michel Baars - Service Delivery Manager
Rob Klein Gunnewiek – Site Reliability Engineer
Notes
Trilogy Part I
Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH).
What this episode covers
So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences.
We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects:
- Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times.
- Episode Season load: What are the Consequences of the Corona measurements on our e-commerce platform and IT systems.
- Episode Way of Working: How we moved from 1 office into 2000 offices and how our 600 people tech community adapted to this new reality
In this first part of the Corona Trilogy, we dive into the Office Automation area. All of sudden everybody who used to work in the office has to work from home and starts using a VPN and do other unusual stuff... What happens to the people who must support this?First of all, from our perspective things seemed to work well! Our compliments for that. We guess there is more to it than meets our eyes.
Guests
Madeleine Boevé – Manager Office Automation
Notes
PingId
Jamf
Chaos engineering... mostly in IT we are focused on structure and order. So, what is it and what can it bring?
We go over the steps:
Start by defining ‘steady state’ as some measurable output of a system that indicates normal behaviour
Hypothesize that this steady-state will continue in both the control group and the experimental group
Introduce variables that reflect real-world events like servers that crash, hard drives that malfunction, network connections that are severed, etc.
Try to disprove the hypothesis by looking for a difference in steady-state between the control group and the experimental group.
.
Guests
Luc Kleeven – Software engineer mostly working in retail platform things.
Notes
The book that was referred to, Learning Chaos Engineering by Russ Miles
Prepare for the Unknown and the Unknowable, Crossfit podcast
Like the Romans already said: Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. One sentence in an article from one of our colleagues triggered us: "Prepare for the unknown and unknowable". We really wondered, how does this help him in his daily job? We talk about crossfit.
What this episode covers
About ring musle-up or a handstand push-up. Of course we relate it to our daily practise. How do you benefit from it in your job and even in making career decisions. We talk about the value of the community and the role of the coach. Setting objectives and push limits when possible or de-load when needed. We thank our guests for their openness.
Guests
* Maarten Roosendaal; Agile IT Architect & Crossfit Level 1 Trainer and former professional basketball player
* Daniela Carbunaru; Team Manager IT at bol.com and passionate crossfitter
Notes
We take a sneak peek into the Utrecht JAVA User Group (JUG) Meetup next week, February 24th. Topics will be: are End-to-End test architectures a Dead End road? And there will be some live hacking: Breaking into your Java web app. This will really give a feel for the importance of security.
What this episode covers
Besides that, we discuss with one of the founders of the Utrecht JUG why it's so great to be part of a community. He explains the great initiatives like for instance the Speaker Incubator the JUG offers.
Guests
* Roy Braam; a Software Craftsman at JPoint. He loves Java, DevOps, and everything that comes with developing good solutions.
* Thodoris Bais; Utrecht Java User Group Founder & Leader, Scrum Master @ABN Amro, Coach.
Notes
The Meetup
Utrecht Java User Group
Previous podcast on testing
With only a few weeks to go to our peak season, we wanted to ensure that the chat app on our webshop was performing up to par. An important part of our customers' questions is answered via this chat app. You can feel the importance of it to be able to handle a load of questions during our peak season.
What this episode covers
Both our customers and our customer service experts couldn't be let down.
Given the short notice, we asked Ymor to help us with their knowledge and experience to perform a performance test together with us and the supplier of the chat software. The aim was to access if we could handle the predicted peak load. The team from Ymor was on stage to share the case. A great opportunity for us as well to sit down with them and share in the podcast as well. Why? Because we became really curious. In our perception, we have an environment in which we validate performance so what did we miss and what did Ymor bring to the table.
Guests
* Marcel Wigman; Technisch Performance consultant Ymor
* Hans van Santvoort; Solution Manager Ymor
* Peter van Dijk; Product Owner in the Customer Service Domain, focus on Live Chat!
Notes
Introducing voice - Improve the customer journey with Intent Recognition and Conversational Analytics
This episode has 2 subjects: PostgreSQL migration and performance. The two guests of our show will present during the PostgreSQL User group meetup at bol.com which started shortly after this recording. The topic of the meetup is introduced as PG ConfEU - The Dutch talks..
Guests
* Martijn Dashorst – a software engineer for over 20 years and has worked with various databases over the years, including DB2, Oracle, Sqlserver, SABDB and PostgreSQL. As a Java (enterprise) developer, he has worked in the education sector for over 12 years and developed student information systems for each of the Dutch levels of education. During those years he has worked on the open-source Java web framework Apache Wicket and given numerous presentations on that and other subjects on international conferences and meetups. Senior Software Engineer at Topicus.
* Sebastiaan Mannem – Technically driven database, container and cloud specialist. Earned his stripes and was battle-hardened by the Dutch Government and Bol.com. Now working for EnterpriseDB as a senior consultant at Enterprise DB.
Notes
PostgreSQL Conference Europe
HVR - tool used during migration from Oracle to Postgres as safeguard
Rust - programming language used by Sebastiaan to loadtest the Postgres database
The two guests of our show work in our experimentation team. They set a target at the beginning of 2019: Our goal is to help hundreds of people at bol.com to run experiments (more effectively). So after a year of experimenting, we are very curious about what they learned and achieved.
What this episode covers
Let’s find out!
Guests
* Denise Visser; Product Manager and Experiment evangelist
* Maarten Zwart; Software Architect and data enthusiast
Notes
* Measuring 2.0 podcast
* Measuring 2.0 at Berlin Buzzwords
It was briefly mentioned in our episode on Advent of Code. We also started an internal Coding Championship. Spaces Championship.
What this episode covers
Let’s dive into this and find out what it is all about.
From our personal experience, we know that is easier to train and improve when we are in a competition. Could it be that the same mechanism is here at work too?
Let us know when you think we should open-up this competition externally as well, goto Linkedin, mailto: techlab@bol.com or twitter us: @bol_com_Techlab
Guests
* Harmen Prins – Software Engineer in our Forecasting DS team. Has been here before in our feature of forecasting and DS, way back in May last year.
* Harsh Khandelwal – Software engineer - Sharing data with our Supplier and other partners
Notes
hackerrank.com the platform we used for the Spaces Championship
Dynamic Programming
In this episode, we talk to Marieke and Tadeusz since we were intrigued by the title of their meetup presentation: Everybody is a UX Researcher. Since we didn't consider ourselves a UX Researcher before we wanted to know more about the subject. And we wanted to find out if being a UX Researcher could also improve our daily professional lives.
What this episode covers
And in the end, we actually think it can. Hope you enjoy the talk too.
Guests
In an earlier episode, we talked with Marieke Linssen about the future of voice and it is great to have her back.
And we have Tadeusz Siudak with him we talked about UX and the benefits of failing in an earlier episode.
Notes
Lean UX
GOOB - Getting Out Of the Building
Speed dating in Design Research
Empathy - Brene Brown, Simon Sinek
A group of Kotlin enthusiast joined KotlinConf back in December last year in Copenhagen. We invited this group to share their learnings for this conference. Two of the participants are sharing their takeaways from KotlinConf with you.
Our first podcast was about the adoption of Kotlin at bol.com.
What this episode covers
Hope you will also enjoy this episode and our second season.
Guests
* Cas Plattel; Software Engineer in the Fintech domain
* Oscar Spruit; Software Engineer in the Apps domain
Notes
KotlinConf
KotlinConf 2019 on youtube
The subject of this podcast episode is totally in line with the holiday season. Time for the advent calendars in many different formats. One of these formats is the Advent of Code 2019!
The bol.com Tech Community is participating in this event.
What this episode covers
In this episode, we talk with 2 participants and discover what it is all about. We explore what it could do. Our software engineers see it as a good way to sharpen their problem solving and a good exercise for the upcoming bol.com spaces programming championship. Some become really competitive.
Guests
* Erik Tillema; Software Engineer in the logistics domain.
* Carst Tankink; Software engineer, in our webshop. And both the driving force behind the bol.com community participating in this Advent of Code edition.
Notes
The Advent of Code 2019
One of the aspects that keep popping up in software development: Technical Debt. Some created on purpose, for example, to get features into production fast. Some just came into existence...
So, what is Technical Debt? And how to fight it. According to the definition* it can be compared to monetary debt.
What this episode covers
If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate 'interest', making it harder to implement changes later on.
A couple of weeks ago George approached us and said, it might be an interesting topic to discuss because in my team an approach to technical debt is experimented with. So, listen to this episode to find out with our guests.
Guests
* George Katsikopoulos; Young Professional and Software Engineer in the team focusing on Collection Processing, Fraud & Risk.
* Sietse Dols; Product Owner of this team 4E.
Notes
*definition according to Wikipedia.
Boys scout rule
Other thoughts on refactoring code.
By zooming out and thinking we take architecture and design into consideration.
How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2. We had some episodes on the cloud already. Now it’s time to discuss how bol.com combines the promises of the cloud and their requirements for Reproducibility and Reliability.
What this episode covers
For instance, balance infinite resources and ultimate autonomy with security.
Within bol.com we developed R2D2. R2D2 stands for our Reproducible Resource Deployment Definition tool which combines the functions of Terraform, Cloud SDK and Puppet Labs.
It helps us to ensure Recovery, Security, Self-service, Stability and Scalability in our move to the cloud.The reason we think we need to secure these aspects: Bol.com has over 100 scrum teams innovating our IT-landscape with over 500 services. We must secure our 10 million customers' data and the data of our 23.000 sellers.
Guests
* Jeroen Schutrup; Site Reliability Engineer in the team that develops the R2D2.
* Quiran Storey; Site Reliability Engineer - just like Jeroen solving operation problems with software solutions.
Notes
Overview of the R2D2 architecture
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/cd7a5b48d10ef97931e5f3b4b6e6fcd816114ff3-569x380.jpg)Google Cloud (GCP)
Google Cloud SDK
The main orchestration tool Puppet
Terraform
Python
Other cloud episodes and blogs:
- Redesign for the Cloud
- Cloud enables data-driven
- Move data in the cloud with Stanley
Shopify's story during SRE 2018 in Dusseldorf
The angle for this episode of our podcast is hackathons. At the time of the recording, there was one going on in our headquarters in Utrecht. What is a hackathon? Why do we organise them? And we talk about some of the initiatives at the current hackathon.
The results of the hackathon were showed during the demotime a week after the hackathon.
What this episode covers
Out of the 20 projects the jury came up with a top 3 and handed over the cup.
Demo Time - Jury handing over the First Price!
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/cc56dca8eb2deb92c953014c004e8f2a5bbcdc7a-507x380.jpg)
Guests
* Kardelen Hatun - Software engineer in the Retails Platform Space and organiser of this edition of the hackathon.
* Edith Kanters - One of our robotics enthusiasts. So, guess what her project is about....
* Anastasija Efremovska - Software Engineer for our Tech Platform.
* Andras Herczeg - Software engineer, one of our Young Professionals.
Notes
Some of our hackathon projects make it to PRO.
In this episode, we talk about growing talent. We dive into how we approach this as bol.com in our Young Professional Program. Also called YPs.
What this episode covers
On our recruitment web site, we call this “the IT journey of a lifetime”. Is that just marketing or is there more to it?
Guests
* Bojan Filipovic; software engineer in team Bond, in the content fleet. Just graduated from the young professional program.
* Martin Cekodhima; software engineer in 4B – financial processing – even sexier than Bond. It's FinTech in an e-commerce company, need we say more?
* Remco Snelders; Had several roles in bol.com both in Tech and other parts like Business Development. He is currently the lead for the Young Professional Program.
Notes
Our next Tech Talent Night to explore our IT Young Professional Program – an unforgettable 2-year journey at the largest online retailer of the Netherlands & Belgium.
Online interview with one of our Young Professionals.
Check the IT Young Professional
The state of Reactive Streams - watch the presentation and listen to the podcast. International Keynote speaker Oleh Dokuka gave a presentation on the state of Reactive Streams at bol.com. We took advantage of this opportunity and interviewed him for the podcast.
What this episode covers
The Reactive Streams specification is state of the art for asynchronous, non-blocking data streams with the fine-grained flow control. Clearly, that was done for a good future... but, does it have any future nowadays? How other programming ecosystems reacted to the appearance of the reactive-streams standard and did they adopted that standard?
(Video: https://youtu.be/8iRea_qwOC8)presentation starts at 6:25.
Guests
Oleh Dokuka is a senior software engineer at Netifi and co-author of the book, “Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5”. He is an active committer to Project Reactor and RSocket, as well as a contributor to Reactive GRPC. In 2019, he was a finalist in the Oracle Groundbreaker Awards in recognition of his expertise with Java.
Notes
* Project Reactor
* RSocket
* The book of Oleh: Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5
* The Reactive Manifesto
This episode is on women in tech. Our guests are two speakers at the upcoming European Women in Tech Conference later this month in Amsterdam. To be honest, if we look at the hosts of this podcast and if we look at our guest list of the past episodes...
What this episode covers
It is still a subject that requires attention.
In an earlier episode we talked about diversity in terms of cultural aspects and in this episode we might find out what the women/men diversity brings into tech. At least that was the idea when we started. It turned into an interesting talk about among other things feedback, personal leadership and vulnerability. So not necessarily the women in tech episode. Interesting for all of of us. Hope you enjoy it.
Guests
* Petra Heesink; Started as a test engineer in development and became an Agile Coach in the Content and Marketing domain in 2018.
* Linda Viksne; Software Engineer in bol.com joined in July. Latvian-born Scotland-bred biomedical scientist turned software developer.
Notes
The mindset intervention - IT professionals taking the lead the talk by Petra and Linda at European Women in Tech.
Imposter Syndrome
In this episode, we talk about User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience(UX). Since this is a very visible topic, everybody has an opinion on it. Even though I’m not working on our webshop I get unsolicited feedback on a regular basis.
Where a lot of the UX Design discussion focuses on our webshop.
What this episode covers
We choose another focus for this episode. The UI that is not common to most of our users but is very much needed for a large part of our 23.000 plaza partners. The Seller DashboarD or SDD in short. The User Interface for other retailers that sell on our platform. This is a substantial part of the turnover that starts here. So, let’s talk about UX Research focused on the platform.
The Seller Dashboard is implemented in the SWAPS that we discussed in an earlier episode of the podcast. We have looked at UX for the webshop before and discussed voice interaction patterns.
Guests
* Koen Olijve; UX designer at bol.com - special focus on the user interface for the plaza partners and the partners that advertise on our website.
Notes
Explanation of NPS
Partner involvement in action: Vote as a partner on the next technical improvements
Task Driven User Interfaces
In this episode, we talk about a way to be inspired and inspiring others, learn from each other and grow your network: Conferences! And more in detail our colleague's road to Devoxx Belgium 2019.
At bol.com we are challenged to present our stories inside and outside bol.com. Inside bol.com we have our great Spaces Summit and meetups, Outside we speak at several conferences. That seems more challenging to a lot of colleagues.
What this episode covers
Especially if it is a conference of 5 days, over 200 speakers and sessions and over 3200 attendees. And our three guests present there. They share their road to Devoxx Belgium.
Guests
* Tom Stoepker, Software Engineer and with his second presence friend of the show. Presenting "Scaling Sustainable Innovation through Team Autonomy”.
* Raul Leal, designer of the backend systems and presenting “Bol.com and the Accelerated Legacy Challenge”.
* Rene Kroon, Software Engineer and with his second presence also a friend of the show. Presenting about “Re-design for the cloud A real-life example of horizontal scaling”. Which might sounds familiar if you listened to previous episodes.
Notes
Re-design for the cloud: a real-life example of horizontal scaling.
Spaces summit, our internal conference
The power of storytelling
In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically.
What this episode covers
The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver careless holidays for our customer”.
During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and service dependencies come together. The webshop connects with appr. 60 services and downstream that amount counts up to over 600. How do we ensure that the experience of the customer is what they expect from the bol.com retail platform? And maybe even more important, how do we ensure that Sinterklaas and the Santa Claus have their presents in time avoiding this disappointed faces of kids?
Guests
* Joshua Potgieter; Software Engineer in the Shopping Space.
* Lars de Bruijn; Software Engineer in the Shopping Space.
both are Site Reliability Engineers with a strong focus on the webshop.
- Sven Weeda; Service Delivery Manager in Shopping and IT Project Lead for the Holiday Season. Helping all teams in bol.com IT to prepare for the season.
Notes
How we deal with emergencies during the season
perfect storm scenario
Site Reliability Engineering, Service Level Indicators (SLI's), Service Level Objectives (SLO's) - Bart Enkelaar discusses SRE in this episode, this is the Google definition
Our Small Web Apps or SWAPs, in short, are something like the SOA for Front-End. We aim for separate deployable parts of the Front-End we have available for our Plaza partners, suppliers and internal users.
In the Front-End we also encountered that we had teams waiting for each other before they could bring functionality to Pro. Basically, because the Front-End became a monolith.
Besides that, people realized that we needed to deliver the same functionality in different Front-Ends.
What this episode covers
For instance content management for our internal product managers and for our external sellers (Plaza partners).
We had to fix both these issues and came up with what we call Small Web Apps. That can be separately deployed and work together in a portal. At the same time, they can be used in the portal that faces the plaza partners and the internal users.
Guests
Elinor Bakker; IT Architect responsible for the introduction of SWAPS back in 2015.
Stefan Nieuwenhuis; Software Engineer in the retailer assortment domain and SWAP advocate.
Notes
SWAPs: From monolith to small web applications
Meetup presentation by Stefan - Speaker deck
Learn more about our partner platform
Design System Setup - Airbnb
Frontify for more documentation
In this episode of the podcast, we talk about API development for the retail platform. A very important subject for a retail platform like bol.com. Given that we are a platform we have a lot of partners to interact with.
What this episode covers
To do that in a neat way we need APIs. And as a platform, we are multi-sided so we have to offer different APIs for different groups of users. So a lot of interesting aspects to cover.
Guests
Jarno Walgemoed; Owner at Sourcelabs; Software engineer with a strong focus on partner API’s at bol.com;
Willem van Schieveen; Team lead in the shopping platform; former PO of the app API, partner APIs & API Gateway. API advocate.
Notes
More about the Retailer API
More about the Open API (or Partner API)
The barcode scanner example which uses the open API functionality that is now also available in the bol.com App.
Inside in the evolution of services and autonomy and the rise of API's
We think "the Cloud" is to broad a subject to handle in one episode of the podcast. That is why we break down our cloud journey in small pieces and go over them in separate episodes. This time we dive into "Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling".
What this episode covers
In an earlier episode we discussed how we moved our Big Data to the Cloud, in the Cloud as an enabler to becoming more data-driven.
When moving applications and services to the Cloud we think about redesigning them, like in this case to enable non-functionals that weren't possible in our data centre. Horizontal scaling and especially auto-scaling has enormous advantages for some of our services. Together with Rogier and Rene, we talk about new possibilities and especially about design for the cloud – horizontal scaling.
Guests
Rogier Lommers - Friend of the show and Software Architect.
Rene Kroon - Software Engineer in our Platform Space. Where we deliver the building blocks that development teams use.
Notes
Re-design for the cloud: a real-life example of horizontal scaling.
Going to Devoxx Antwerp? Join Rene Kroon at his presentation Scheduled on Thursday from 12:55 to 13:10 in Room 6
In this podcast, we talk with two of our coaches in tech about making an impact on the performance of teams and people. The reference they use to do this is called Human System Engineering.
In bol.com we have different types of coaches with different focus areas. Outside tech, or bol.com wide so to say, we have coaches for careers, personal coaches and SPARK coaches.
What this episode covers
SPARK is our holocracy/network way of working.
Burgert joined bol.com recently and was asked to reflect on what he encountered during his first months. We preach autonomy which brings a lot, but all good things have a 'dark side' so he says. Suzanne and Burgert share great examples of how they are looking at people and teams. The approach they use is Human Systems Engineering. They share some insights and how to impact the performance.
Guests
Suzanne Heerschop; Coach in Tech focusing on the Shopping area and fanatic sketch noter. Using drawing as a second language to create a better understanding. She acts as an ambassador of visual impact. Trying to build a community of people like to engage with others this way.
Burgert Kirsten; Coach in tech, focusing on the Logistics area with a love for improv theatre.
Notes
Our holocracy way of working is discussed by Harm Jans in this podcast.
Coach for compliance or coach with compassion
Human Systems Engineering (HSE)
Our autonomous way of working explained here
The big question in this episode is “How can we create 10 million personalized webshops? Tailormade for every one of our customers so it suites their needs best?” In short, the answering is Measuring 2.0.
This enables us to measure more accurately how customers are behaving in our webshop. This enables to give them a more personalized experience.
What this episode covers
We are aiming for a feedback loop of 1 second. So 1 second after and action was performed by a customer in our webshop the data is available for service that handles personalization and recommendations. These services, in turn, provide data to the webshop to create a personalized experience for every customer.
Guests
* Niels Basjes - IT Architect and international keynote speaker giving lectures about this and other subjects.
* Oscar Westra van Holte Kind - Software Engineer in the Measuring 2.0 team
Notes
Niels Basjes on Measuring at Berlin Buzz words 2019
Measuring 2.0 at Spaces Summit
Niels Basjes at Berlin Buzz words 2016
In this episode of the podcast, we talk about accelerating organisations. We invited Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen to our studio. They recently launched their book - Formule X - Hoe zorg je voor extreme versnelling in je organisatie - at bol.com. The English version, How to reach extreme acceleration in your organization, will be available before the holiday season.
What this episode covers
The subject of the book how to accelerate your organization is closely related to many subjects we talked about in our podcast series. For instance Agile at Scale and Speeding up by Testing.
Jurriaan and Rini are both very experienced in this field. They come up with great examples around themes like how to simplify and power to the people that do the work.
Guests
* Jurriaan Kamer; Partner of The Ready focusing on Organizational Design and Transformation Consultant, Speaker and Author;
* Rini van Solingen; Professor in global software engineering. CTO @ Prowareness. Expert in speed and agility of people and organizations, Speaker and Author;
Notes
Formule X - The book on how to accelerate your organisation;
The FASTER model
Avondseminar: Formule X - Versnel je organisatie
North star Metric
Where do we learn most in our lives? When things that we do succeed, or when we do stuff and they don't turn out how we expected? They "fail". Exactly, we can learn a lot from our failures. How does this relate to Tech? Or, to be more precise, how does that relate to the design of the webshop? And how do we know if we succeed or fail, is it a gut feeling or do we learn through structured research?
In this episode, we explore the theme of success, failure and learning together with Tadéusz Siudak.
What this episode covers
Tadéusz is one of our Interaction Designers working on the webshop. Like all our employees he is aiming to improve every day. Making the lives of our customers easier.
To give a good perspective on the context we also elaborate on how interaction design is performed at bol.com. In the episode, we also take some sidetracks looking into thinks like guerilla testing.
Guests
Tadéusz Siudak
Notes
Learn more on voice interaction.
Testing in autonomous teams - speed is everything
The role of testers has evolved in the last decade. Test automation has become the norm. So, testers have grown more towards developers.
What this episode covers
What are the skills they need to succeed? With the rise of autonomous teams and product teams, more and more tasks of testers moved to other roles like developers. What knowledge must be spread over these roles to ensure that we can release to PRO without fearing what will happen?
And there have been other evolutions like the one to more micro-service-oriented architectures and companies moving to the cloud. Both coming with their own challenges. What is the impact on testing and testers?
Guests
* Joost van Wollingen; Consultant Quality and Test Automation at Xebia and former colleague at bol.com in a test role. The lead of the test guild. Who has grown really close to a software engineer? We have worked together in several settings here;
* Ivo de Bruijn; Software engineer at bol.com who started in a test role;
Notes
and Promotional Code for EXPAND*
Expand ConferenceThe EXPAND Conference 2019 brings together every IT discipline, for an in-depth look at the value and difference every role brings. We will learn new ways of working together and sharing our knowledge, with a focus on mastery in engineering teams.
For conference info, go here: conference info
Signup and get 10% reduction. Pay 225,- instead of 250,-, use this link or use the code Techlab2019 in the Eventbrite checkout**.
Other notesIsolated testing - replacing the way testing in DEV and TEST was done. No more dependencies
Technical Aspects (like the introduction of Service Oriented Architecture) and Cultural Aspects (like the introduction of You Build It, You Run It, You love It) are both influencing the way testing is approached
Speed is key. if you create a fast feedback loop and it only needs 5 minutes to build, you stay in your context.
Shift Left vs Shift Right is explained. Earlier testing on DEV and do more on PRO.
*exclusive for Techlab Visitors
** as long as tickets are available
Cloud as Enabler to become more data-driven. The adjective data-driven means that progress in an activity is compelled by data, rather than by intuition, personal experience or a gut feeling.
Googling data-driven gives you over 637 mln. results so time to add an extra result to this with this episode.
But we wanted to make it more specific.
What this episode covers
We moved our big data into the cloud and we got some nice insights that we wanted to share. We asked our two guests of this episode to do so.
It turned out to be an interesting talk about data quality but also about 'data wrestling'. About how to migrate your older data platform into an up to date data platform. About training your business consumers in their mind-shift from 'resource-aware' to 'cost-aware'. And about how to explore all the new opportunities that come with this new setup.
Guests
Anne van den Brink; Manager Business Intelligence Platform & Support
Arthur Hansen; Business Analyst in Finance – Controlling
Notes
Atscale; the layer in between BigQuery and Tableau
Tableau; the BI tool used by 50% of the company to do their daily analysis
BigQuery; Google's Datawarehouse running in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
One of the opportunities discussed in this episode is about data science. In earlier episodes we spent some time on this subject: Forecasting, Intent Recognition
'OK Google.....' - the future of voice is here. Everybody with a Google Assistant on their phone or with Google Speakers installed uses this command more and more. It’s even used by radio DJ’s to make fun and just shout out commands to see what’s happening.
What this episode covers
And you know when people start making jokes with it, it’s becoming a success. There is a future for interaction by voice. Time to talk about this success with our two guests who were part of the team that introduced the future of voice in bol.com.
'OK Google...., talk to bol.com'
Guests
* Marieke Linssen; Interaction Designer with a focus on conversation design.
* Marvin Zwolsman; Software Engineer in our Young Professional program He participated in the voice project.
Notes
Google Home en Google Nest Hub - see our description on tech.bol.com here
Google Voice Interaction
Intent Recognition explained by Daniel Heres
Agile at Scale. Ever since we started our journey into Agile and scrum, we have been wondering whether we were on the right path for business and IT agility. Way back when we were with 7 scrum teams scaling wasn’t the most important issue.
What this episode covers
With our growth came challenges for scaling our agile way of working. We have been on a few plateaus where we were searching for the next step, as have been other companies on the same venture. Today we talk about some of the things we learned along the way of scaling agile and we look into where we stand today and what could be our next leap. Our guests of today are deep into this. They are part of the “transformation team”.
Guests
* Jorien Brangert; Performed in many roles in the webshop. Got involved in agile at scale. Currently the lead in the “flight level stream”;
* Hessel de Gelder; Has worked a lot on the supply chain side. Always has been interested in strategy and innovation. Currently the lead in the “product team stream”;
Notes
Business Agility
The introduction of Microservices and the Man on the Moon project
Klaus Leopold - Flight Levels presentation at Bol.com
Output vs Outcome driven
OGSM process (Objectives/Goals/Strategies/Measurements)
OKR format (objectives and key results)
As podcast makers, we are very happy that we can talk about a subject that is very close to ours. In this episode, we talk about one of the recent product launches. The launch of audiobooks.
What this episode covers
Besides the already existing “all you can read subscription” we developed an Audiobook subscription together with Rakuten Kobo.
In the world that is dominated by pictures and movies the book itself and reading are under pressure. But we also see that the audience for listening on demand is growing if you look at the Spotifies of this world. People get used to the concept of all you can watch, listen, etc. based on the success of the Netflixes of this world. Again Tech is driving this also for the launch of the Audiobook subscription and our guests of today's show know everything about this.
Guests
Emilie Osinga - responsible for subscriptions in our Reading and Learning shop.
Hicham Mzyati – Test Engineer in the team responsible for the delivery of all the Digital Goods – e-books; games, and the launch of audiobooks.
Notes
One of the challenges in a (micro-)service landscape is to keep track of all capabilities in the services. Another is to keep track of the consumers of your service and the consumers beyond. Taking our IT landscape as an example: we work with over 120 teams on over 850 different applications varying from services, GUI’s, services, data builders and other types of applications.
In an environment like ours, it’s crucial to understand what applications we have, what functionality they offer and who are working on them.
What this episode covers
In the past, the list of applications was maintained on our confluence pages, by hand. Later, engineers integrated properties data to become more accurate and recently a team stood up to make it ‘spot on’. One single source of truth. It’s called Software Parade.
To keep track of these we use our Software Parade. It is created and maintained with a level of fun and enthusiasm that is contagious. If you listen to this episode, you can feel the level of passion for coding and create great solutions that radiate from those involved in shaping the Software Parade. So we think it is safe to say that this is a fun way to create an overview of hundreds of applications.
Software Parade is created on a Graph Database. A Graph Database relies on Graph Theory to store, map and query nodes, edges (also called graphs or relations), and properties to these. Since for the task at hand, the relations or graphs between objects are very important a Graph Database seems a good choice. We choose Neo4j to build the Software Parade.
Guests
Kristel Nieuwenhuys; Architect with services and applications for our internal organisation in her portfolio. Besides that, she is the product owner of one of our webshop teams.
Ronald Willems; Responsible for the IT Architecture within the department Customer Service and Financial Operations at Bol.com. So for example for the Intent recognition, we talked about a few episodes back.
Notes
This is a special episode of the bol.com Techlab Podcast. It’s recorded on at our own Tech Conference the bol.com spaces summit. Directly after Jim gave his presentation about 'scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball' we interviewed him.
We had a great presentation at Spaces Summit with the Title: “scary close to fully autonomous teams”.
What this episode covers
Within bol.com we strive for autonomous teams because we believe that we will go faster, are more agile and we have more fun. But it is also great to hear from people outside bol.com how they perceive this. So, we are happy to introduce our external guest to you. As he worked in bol.com for 5 years but went over to another company end 2018 he is the person to ask for reflection. Time to introduce him to you.
Please bear with us, we set-up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were on this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.
Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mailto: techlab@bol.com
Guests
Jim van der Waal; Product Manager at Onefootball in Berlin. Before that, he started as Information Analyst in 2014 at bol.com and built a broad experience in roles like Scrum Master, IT Project Manager and Product Owner – presented “Life at Onefootball: scary close to fully autonomous teams”.
Notes
We discuss the move from Jim to Onefootball in Berlin and if he already feels included.
After this introduction, we dive into the why of autonomous teams at Onefootball. Jim explains which specialities/roles work together in the teams. Already at bol.com he was interested in the Lean Startup Principles and now he explains how we recognize these within Onefootball, already 200 people in total, 55 million downloads of the app and 11 million active customers worldwide.
We take some time to discuss and ask about the way of working. Several items during the presentation got our attention. Validating ideas, the discovery funnel, how people get emotionally attached to ideas, maintaining small backlogs and not spend time on investigation of 20-30 epics.
The way Onefootball deals with the fact that there are too many good ideas? Decide within the team.
A great one Jim explained: focus on output versus outcome. Output focused means, for instance, focusing on the story points, focusing on the outcome the customer value.
The setup of SRE is discussed.
Jim also discusses some themes like “the technical landscape shouldn’t describe your customer experience”.
Interested in the video of Jim's talk during spaces summit? Check here
Three years ago, a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories.
What this episode covers
The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit.
Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit 2019 location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit.
In the previous episode of the podcast we interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why and Who and had small interviews with some of the presenters.
In part II of the spaces summit, we interview three presenters to give you an impression and to share the key takeaways with you. To add to the impression, we share quotes from the audience with you.
Please bear with us, we set-up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were at this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.
Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mailto: techlab@bol.com
Guests
Leon van Tegelen; Tech Community Director in bol.com
Remco Overdijk; Expert Systems Engineer - presented “Surviving the Kubernetes jungle”
Ramona de Wit van Ark; Test lead Albert Heijn – Digital Development and founder of Stichting Kalyani – presented “Testing, anyone can do it, right?”
Roy Triesscheijn; Software Engineer at bol.com – presented “The Magic of real-time rendering in games”
Simonas Narbutas; System Engineer at bol.com – presented “Connecting your coffee table to wifi”
Notes
Remco touched upon items in the Kubernetes domain. Think of the containers orchestration manager. He also explained what we implemented within bol.com to deliver the structures around the platform. We call this R2D2. (stream from 57 minutes)
Ramona talked about the three key values within Albert Heijn they have for testing:
- Team effort
- Investigation over validation
- Always give feedback
We dive into the difference between the explicit versus tacit things and even the Buurman and Buurman series is discussed. She uses this in her presentation to explain the way a mini agile team works. As a founder of the Stichting Kalyani she also explains what learnings she uses from that environment in her daily practice.
Roy takes us with him on his journey to explain the way games cope with the rendering aspects. He made a great comparison during his presentation between the relatively simple environment of bol.com (only text and images) in which it sometimes takes up to one second to render the page versus the game industry where rendering should only take 0.167 seconds at the max.Another aspect he’s touching upon is the difference in fixing issues.
Simonas talked about his hobby. He created an infinite table from a standard IKEA coffee table and connected it to his SMART home installation. Because he brought the actual table we asked him briefly how his talk went.
Three years ago a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories.
What this episode covers
The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit.
Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit.
We interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why and Who. More important we had small interviews with some of the presenters to give you an impression and to share the key takeaways with you. To add to the impression, we share quotes from the audience with you. There were so many interesting things to share that we decided to create 2 podcasts for you. One for this week and one for next week.
Please bear with us, we set up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were at this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.
Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mail to techlab@bol.com
Guests
Jurrie van Rooijen; Tech Director in bol.com
Niels Kuiper; software engineer and as committee member answering our questions on the What? Why? And Who?
Lisanne de Rooij; member of the Vattenfall Solar Team and Keynote Speaker at Spaces Summit: “Showing the world the power of high-end technology and sustainable energy”.
Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and Speaker at Spaces Summit: “Bottom-up SRE- Making an informed decision between tech-dept and innovation”.
Notes
Spaces Summit; the 3rd edition of a bol.com tech summit for and by engineers and friends. This edition had a 500 people audience of which 80 external and 40 friends of.
Vattenfall Solar team; the team of 16 TU Delft students. During this episode, we talked about the 8 winning factors of a team of which teamwork is the most important. Next to that Lisanne explains the way or working with protocols well. She’s looking forward to the launch of the NunaX, the 16th of July.
Site Reliability Engineering; SRE is the way Google runs production systems. The framework goes back to 2003. Bart explains how it aligns business innovation into operations. SRE concepts like SLI, SLO and Error Budgets are being discussed. He answers the question, do you need an SRE team or not?
In this episode, we touch upon a cultural aspect of Tech within bol.com, Cultural Diversity. Over the last couple of years, our international community especially in IT in bol.com grew from 5 in 2014 to 120 in 2019 out of a total of 450 people in Tech. As a former Dutch company, you can imagine that this brings a lot of potential and it also has its challenges.
In the week of the 21st of May, the World Day of Cultural Diversity, bol.com celebrated this with Cultural Diversity Week.
What this episode covers
For us a great occasion to have this topic discussed in our podcast.
We touch upon a lot of different aspects. It starts with the onboarding. The language barrier discussed a couple of times and is a red line in this talk. Our guests explain in a passionate way what ‘live-translation’ and ‘headphones’ do with the feeling of ex- and inclusion. What we liked most was the way they explained what they had to overcome to really feel included. Realizing that to become more valuable they need to be more included, so asking for inclusion was the next step.The open mind and withholding judgement are key as well as awareness in this transition from a Dutch to a multicultural organization. The Cultural Diversity Week was part of that.
Never realized we introduced new languages in bol.com, we call this ‘European English’ and ‘European Dutch’.
We hope that the commitment to this subject as presented by our guest come across in this podcast. Happy Listening and let us know what you think, using techlab@bol.com
Guests
Colette Biervliet-Schranz
Mary Gouseti
Nathalie Neesen
Notes
Inclusion framework; the explanation of exclusion and inclusion with a clear model.
Four grid matrix that shows what Values in Uniqueness and Belongingness does to Exclusion and Inclusion (captures from a study, Inclusion and Diversity in Work Groups: A Review and Model for Future Research)
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/1f2f92d425441caa2cf7cc6e5dc3daa3e961185f-500x246.jpg)The video of our colleagues discussing their move to the Netherlands and in this Blog, Volkan describes his life as an expat in the Netherlands
Workplace; our internal facebook
In this episode, we talk about Axle. Axle is our internal framework for building Java-based applications. Well actually as you will learn in this episode it is not a framework.
What this episode covers
It is an opinionated approach to building Java applications like Spring Boot is an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with a minimum of hassle.
Since internally we use the same thing for cross-cutting concerns like logging and metrics these all come out of the box when using Axle. Besides that, it simplifies setting up common application features like messaging integration, Quartz scheduling and Hystrix resilience. In addition to that, it provides standardised REST support. Think in terms of Swagger support, the configuration of data conversion defaults and providing problem handling.
Listen and check if something like Axle could help you or your organisation.
Guests
Maurice Zeijen
Roy Jacobs
Notes
* Springboot
* Swagger UI
* Cloud Pub/Sub
In this episode we dive into the world were e-commerce becomes physical. We talk about the bol.com Fulfilment Center (BFC). Within these centres, we have several challenges and one of these challenges has to do with the picking algorithm.
What this episode covers
The pick algorithm determines the route in a warehouse that is performed to pick all the products for a set of customers.
As bol.com we have very high volumes of products that we must send from our warehouses to customers every day. So, it makes sense to optimize the distance that has to be walked to get those products from the racks. Besides the distance, it is also key that no waiting times occur, so the operators should be able to walk around and not wait for others. That is the reason that when you have a look inside the fulfilment centres you see the same goods spread over different places. Especially the fast moving ones. If we bring down the time needed to pick a product, we can pick more products per person per time unit.
Guests
Bram Vermeer
Maikel Houthuijzen
Notes
Change Data Capture - CDC; the way we use to get the data needed from the 'closed' database environment of the Warehouse Management System. We use the CDC solution of HVR
Reflex; the Warehouse Management system used by bol.com
Adelia; the 4gl tool used to add functionality to the WMS
In this episode, we talk with Daniel and Emiel, software engineer and product owner in the customer support domain. In this domain, the focus is to help our customers in the best way possible. But what if we can prevent the customer to feel the need to contact bol.com in the first place, they asked themselves.
What this episode covers
They realized this can be possible using the analyses of the various customer interactions we have via the Chatbot "Billie", live chat, phone and email.
For these analyses, they introduced techniques from the Data Science and Machine Learning domain. Natural Language Processing is needed as well as Comprehender Techniques. As a team, they investigated models available in the open source community. In the podcast, we talk about how we adapted them for this purpose followed by the training of these models.
We talk about the four steps to get from idea to the usable information for the product specialists. The product specialist can use the information provided to enhance the product details and descriptions to a level where a minimum of questions from customers is needed.
One of the first deliverables was the introduction of so-called unhappy products report. Products which cause relatively much customer interactions. It presents these products but even more important, possible causes.
Guests
Daniël Heres; software engineer
Emiel Ubink; product owner
Notes
Design sprints as part of the way of working to increase the speed and shorten the feedback loop:design sprint
Determination of the important words in the text is done by the use of TF/IDF which stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency. It's part of the Natural Language Processing and to determine the Smart Word Clouds. TF/IDF
BigQuery is used to store the data to be analysed later on.
Predictive Models are being used to improve the shop which should result in a better customer journey with a lower number of customer questions.
Unsupervised Learning is discussed as the way the models are being trained and verified
Clustering Topic Modelling; finding out the latent thems (topics)
Update 4th June 2021:
We received a mail from one of our listeners providing us with a link to more up to date info on unsupervised learning
In this episode we talk about GO. Go is not a language that is used the most at bol.com. That’s is Java, together with Kotlin.
What this episode covers
In 2014 it was introduced for the first time and reached a steady but not so big user group. Recently, along with the move to the cloud, we experience a second wave of adoption. When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in this episode, you might even believe Go is the future.
Guests
Rogier Lommers
Tom Stoepker
Notes
The starting point for Gohttps://golang.org
Learn go by diving into the library of exampleshttps://gobyexample.com/
The github library with the opensource code from uber referred tohttps://github.com/uber-go
How to learn Go? Take the tour and you are ready to gohttps://tour.golang.org/
The funny project mentioned to improve the imageshttps://techlab.bol.com/from-a-crazy-hackathon-idea-to-an-empty-queue/.
As long as retail exists, people tried to predict the future. An accurate forecast makes it much easier to buy the correct amount of products from suppliers, know what you need to keep on stock and even know what the sales will do with specific promotions.
Over the last couple of years, this domain changed dramatically because of the introduction of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, we chat about this changing playing field to share our experiences with you.
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Guests
Harmen Prins
Erick Webbe
Notes
Kotlin was first used by our teams a couple of years ago. It had an interesting start that shows how we adopt technology in general. In different feature teams a group of software engineers explored their own use cases for Kotlin.
What this episode covers
Some very enthusiastic, some a bit more skeptical and eventually they found each other. A new community in bol.com was born, the Kotlin community. In this episode we talk about this journey, the use cases, the adaption and the impact on frameworks that we use in our feature teams.
Guests
Anastasija Efremovska
Mykola Gurov
Notes
The survey mentioned is the Stack Overflow Survey 2019, In particular this section: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology
"Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com. Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms."
This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast.In this introduction episode we like to share with you:What is this podcast about, why did we start it and why should you listen to it?
We hope that you enjoy the podcasts as much as we enjoy the creation of it.
What this episode covers
We love to hear your comments, so leave them behind for us and share your ideas.